Breaking The Ice
by Mysteryfaith
Summary: The kingdom believed that Elsa had been hidden until her coronation, but that wasn't the whole truth. When she was eighteen, she lived a secret life outside the castle walls with a boy who would redefine how she felt about everything - and everyone. (Set before, during and after the film).
1. A Bad Feeling

It seemed to Elsa that the days were longer now than they used to be. When she was a child – or at least, before Anna's accident – it felt as if sunlight only streamed for a matter of hours before the moon ascended. Now, when viewed from the frosted windows of her room, it appeared that years could pass before the sun would set.

But it wasn't the passing of time that had changed since those short summers. Sure enough, to the children she watched from her window, the days were just as brief; it was her that had changed. She used to be so busy with Anna that time simply flew past her, but she knew only too well that those things were impossible now. She was alone now. That was it.

Resting her elbows against the windowsill, she clenched her fists and watched hopelessly as tiny flourishes of ice crackled against the glass. She had been taught for as long as she could remember that her powers were a curse to be hidden, but she indulged in them for a few moments, and allowed the flourishes to grow and engulf the whole windowpane. With one pale finger, she traced a swirling pattern in the frost, before turning away with a faint smile.

A gentle knocking against the door caught her attention, and for a moment, she froze. Her heart sank as she imagined Anna standing on the other side, waiting in the corridor for a response she would never get – not that Elsa was withholding it to be cruel. Before she could mourn the loss of their friendship, as she had often wiled away her long hours doing, she heard her father's voice.

"Elsa?" he called.

"Yes, father?" She crossed the room and reached for a pair of silky lilac gloves on the side-table. They had been a gift from her parents for her sixteenth birthday, and she recalled painful memories from the day as she pulled the material over her fingertips. Then, the gloves had been a burden – one that she had accepted gracefully but quietly resented – and she hadn't been able to stop herself from cracking slightly beneath the pressure of her parents' approval. She had replaced her worn, dusty gloves with the new pair before running out into the courtyard and sheltering beneath the arches, hiding her sobbing from the worried servants. Now, they were a duty, and she barely gave a thought to what they represented as she opened the door to her father.

"Good morning, Elsa," he said warmly as he entered the room. She carefully shut the door behind him out of habit, and turned to face his eyes to see concern in them – he too had focused his attentions on the lilac gloves. "I do hope that you will approve of our gift choices tomorrow," he added to his greeting cautiously.

"Don't worry," she uttered stiffly in response. Conversation with her parents was always stilted; between them stood the division of her powers. The powers stood between her and everybody else, but she felt it most painfully with her parents, as she knew that their precautions were necessary but key to her imprisonment in the castle. "That was two years ago. It won't happen again."

He smiled. She spotted a certain amount of pride behind his eyes. "I'm glad to hear it," he responded, plucking up an ornament from her side-table and examining it for a moment. It was a rounded ball, just large enough to fill his palm as he rolled it between his fingers, decorated with intricately-painted snowflakes. "Did your mother buy you this from the market?"

"It was a gift from Anna," she replied.

Her father paused for a moment, before putting the object back on to its gilded stand. "It's pretty."

Elsa swallowed, hoping to stop her throat from tightening with the threat of tears. It wasn't like her to be sentimental, and she silently scolded herself for the moment of weakness. "I know." Like her father, she had examined it closely, but had spent hours poring over the tiny flecks on each snowflake. Her sister was a budding artist it seemed, as each shape was different and beautifully unique; it had been a gift, delivered to her by a kind young servant a few months ago who was friends with Anna. She hadn't given the young man a gift in return to send back to her sister, but she had wanted to. Just seeing the ornament in her father's hands made her long to even more.

Her father had been watching her as her face softened with thoughts of Anna, and so she collected herself quickly and resorted back to her well-practised mask of calm confidence. "The castle's going to be a little busier for a few weeks – we have a trade visit from the royalty of Groveston." His words were gentle but not forgiving; they were both well aware of their responsibilities in the family, and hers was not to have contact with Anna. He could not encourage her to betray that promise.

She had spent years memorising each detail of the map hung on the wall of her room, but she feigned ignorance just so that her father would stay for a little longer. "Where's that again?"

He shot a sideways glance to the map on the wall. "It's just a few miles down the fjord. It's not a huge trading partner – they sell us some of the salmon that swim in the rapids by their village, and we give them some woven clothes – but we have to keep up our relations with these places."

"Is that why you're leaving next week?" She was grateful for a visitor, but she couldn't help her tone from growing hostile with the words. Her parents were due to depart on a long voyage to a foreign territory, and despite her pleading with them to stay for a little while longer, they were already preparing for the trip.

He sighed, and softly extended a hand towards her face to tuck back a stray strand of hair. "That's partly why we're going, yes," he said quietly. "However, we also have some promises to keep over there."

"You know that I have a bad feeling about this trip."

"I know." He let one hand rest on her shoulder. Her muscles were tense, and a small blossom of ice appeared on the cuff of his jacket, gleaming white against the navy of the material. Elsa withdrew herself from his touch immediately and shrank back towards the wall of her room, hoping for a shadow to swallow her up and hide her from her father's disapproving gaze.

She didn't need to explain that it was getting worse. There was a mutual understanding between them that her powers were strengthening against her will, an unspoken but acknowledged truth that they chose to ignore. The icy blemish on his jacket was just another reminder of that, and though he could have reprimanded her for letting her powers show, he simply lowered his hand from the empty air where she had been standing and headed for the door.

Showered in the full beam of the morning sun, the gilded embellishment of his robes glittered, and he once again became the King instead of just her father. As the title demanded, she bowed her head with respect when he reached for the door handle. "I just came to warn you about the visitors," he called back to her. "Remember to be careful."

And with a gentle tap, the door to the outside world was closed again, and she was left in the shadows.

Alone, she had time to think. _Eighteen._ The word sounded so strange in her mind – it felt like freedom, like it should represent a rush of independence or the unlocking of binding chain, and yet it still rang sour against the confining walls of her room. With age, her freedoms had gradually increased – at least she could leave her room sometimes now, though it was usually at night when Anna and the servants were asleep. Still, she bitterly defined herself as a prisoner, and returned to her window as if seeking a glimpse of the world outside a cell.

She watched longingly as the ships tilted on the waves. If she stretched over the windowsill, she could see down to the docks, where the palace guards were helping to unload crates from a huge travelling ship. Her eyes were drawn to the figurehead at the bough of the ship, which was carved from a strong wood but seemed to be painted with gold detail. The distance restricted her, but she picked out the eyes and mouth of a face carved into the wood, and slowly she worked out the shape to be a woman's head, staring sternly with an empty gaze towards the horizon.

It seemed that everybody was down by the ship, heaving crates on to the docks and greeting the Groveston visitors. Even in the bustle of the excited crowd, she could spot the figures of her parents and sister, surrounded by guards. Elsa couldn't hear a sound coming from the corridor – all the servants were probably busy in the kitchens in a mad rush to prepare a feast for the newcomers. The castle was practically empty.

In an empty castle, there would be no witnesses to a little bit of magic.

And the idea had bloomed in her mind before she had the will to stop it. The thought was dangerous, yes, and getting caught would be disastrous, of course – but despite every part of her mind that told her an adventure could never end well, there was just enough of her heart that was yearning for just that to overpower everything else and lead her to the doorway. Her parents never locked the door now, which she had always considered to be a liability until today. Today, it was a blessing. It was almost a sign that she _had_ to see what was out there.

To see the palace in daylight! Her fingertips twitched excitedly at just the idea of it, sending little shoots of hail into the carpet. She guessed that she wouldn't have long before the crowds wound their way back up to the castle, but it was enough. A second would be enough – more than that would simply be a gift.

Elsa was at the door. Her hand trembled as she reached for the handle. She repeated to herself very carefully that _a second would be enough_. She was wearing gloves, and so she told herself that she would be safe. It was just a second outside. If no one was around, then what harm could it do?

As her fingertips touched the metal of the door handle, comfortingly cool against her palm, it crackled gently with the spread of ice. So the gloves may not have been as effective as she had hoped, but she had already pursued the idea beyond the point of not following it through, and so she just told herself not to touch anything. She turned it, slowly, shakily, and opened her eyes to a bright new world that had been closed to her for so long.


	2. That's Some Talent

Just as Elsa had expected, the castle was eerily silent – on her worst days, when she had found herself pressing her ear eagerly to the bedroom wall in the hope of hearing some sign of life in the corridor, she could always hear a servant hurrying around or Anna's voice drifting down the hall. Today, she couldn't hear any of that. It was just silent.

She stepped into the hall as if tentatively treading on fresh snow, careful where to place her feet in fear of making a sound. Her eyes were immediately drawn to the window that lined the corridor wall, and the sparkling blue fjord that she could glimpse through it; she had seen the water a million times before, but never like this. It had never gleamed this brightly when she had watched it from her bedroom window.

The door gently creaked shut behind her. She was out of the room. For years, she had dreamed of the day when the door would shut behind her, and not slam into her face as she waited inside the prison walls; now, she could feel the fluffy carpet brushing against the skin between her toes in the light of day, and it was real. _It was real._

Elsa let out a quiet, girlish squeal – the sound didn't suit her confined disposition, but it felt good, so she repeated it a little louder – and moved towards the window. Instinctively, she put her hands against the glass to peer down into the fjord, and when her gloved fingers pressed against the pane, it began to crackle with frost. She went to remove them, and immediately swung her head from side to side to check that she was alone – but with a confirmation that nobody was around to see her do it, she let her hands stay where they were.

It felt like a small but significant rebellion, and a mere taste of it was exhilarating. Squaring her jaw and parting her feet slightly, she pressed her fingers harder against the glass and watched as the patterned frost swirled from pane to pane, eventually covering the whole window. Elsa smiled – and it was a real smile that stretched across her face, rather than the forced smiles she was used to wearing for her parents.

She had both hands lifted away from the glass and was just flexing her magical muscles, working out which shapes she could draw with just a flick of her fingers in the frosted pane, when she heard the voice behind her.

"That's some talent."

_Conceal, don't feel._ In a terrifying rush of panic, the words of her father popped into her mind and led her to drop her hands. She spun rapidly away from the window and hid her hands behind her back, tugging anxiously at her gloves in the hope that they might make the pattern fade more quickly. The effort was fruitless, and the pane, still etched with her experimental designs, remained entirely frosted over.

Elsa faced the intruder now. He was dressed in a long grey cloak that seemed to shimmer with flecks of green and russet, sparkling in the morning light – though it was tied tightly around his neck and flowed down to the ground, she could see beneath it that he had a lanky, slender body. He had a youthful face which was overshadowed by a shock of black hair, hopelessly tangled from the summer breeze, and a pair of brown eyes that watched her expectantly.

"Who are you?" she screeched after taking him in for a few seconds. She spotted a pair of ragged brown slippers covering his feet, which would explain the silence of his approach – but still, she felt as if he had done it on purpose, and was angry at him for the shock. "What are you doing in here?"

"I'm Dalli. I'm here from Groveston. I was just taking a look around the castle." His explanation was hurried and littered with hesitations, as if he was afraid that she might do to him what she had done to the windowpane behind them; the frost that had stretched across it was beginning to shrink, retreating back towards the icy handprints she had left in the centre of the window. "You must be Anna."

"No," she retorted – her tone was growing hostile though her only feeling was fear, and the vibrancy of her emotion was enough to send a few drops of hail from the palms of her hands to the ground. They hit the carpet with a soft patter, and they both stared at the melting balls of ice with equal trepidation.

After a moment of stiff silence, Dalli met her gaze and raised his eyebrows. "If you're not Anna," he responded slowly, wary of the hailstorm that was brewing in her palms, "then who are you?"

She clenched her fists determinedly, and watched in relief as the hailstones dwindled in size. "I'm Elsa."

His eyes widened. "Princess Elsa?"

"Yes." The word stumbled out of her mouth, held back by her reluctance, but it seemed pointless to hide her identity – if this visiting royal knew anything about Arendelle, he would know who she was.

It took a moment of thought for him to piece together the things he had seen, and configure them into some sort of sense. His voice had shrunk to little more than a whisper when he was willing to speak again. "I was told by the villagers that you never leave your room."

"They were correct." Her answers were curt and defensive. She no longer wanted to feel the carpet between her toes. She no longer wanted to see the water from the corridor window. She just wanted to feel the cool of the door handle against her palm again, and to retreat back into her room, where she could be safe – where her powers would be hidden.

"But you're out here!" he exclaimed loudly, gesturing to her bare feet with an open palm.

She clenched her hands together anxiously and tried desperately to think of a way to withdraw politely and retreat back into her room. "It was a mistake. I should be going – it was nice to meet you, I'm sure, but . . ."

"Wait, wait!" Dalli stretched out a hand as she turned away, and it brushed briefly against the skin of her shoulder. Elsa gasped in shock and a bolt of ice ran up the edge of his cloak, frosting the dark material with glints of shocking white.

"Don't touch me!" she shouted in furious response.

They held a silent gaze, bristling with anger and misunderstanding, for a few more seconds before he raised both hands in a sign of surrender. "You seem tense," he remarked gently.

Elsa stretched out her hand towards the door, and grazed the wood with a fingertip. With one swift movement, she could be in her room and lock herself away from this stranger. She would never have to see his face again – but there was something in that face that made her hesitate, just for a few seconds more, without moving at all. She had left a tiny trail of ice where her fingertip had touched the wood, and Dalli watched it in amazement. She hadn't realised how much she missed seeing wonder in the eyes of those who saw her powers, instead of fear.

"Why aren't you out on the docks with your family?" he enquired, hoping not to spook her away with carefully-chosen questions. It was almost as if she was a spectre, or a figment of a fairytale; he wasn't sure if she was even real, but he was desperate to find out.

Elsa just gave him a weary glance, and indicated with her eyes towards the frost that was slowly crackling up and down the wood of the door. She looked back at him. With a pang of sadness, he understood.

"So is that why you hide away?" he probed further, pointing briefly to the icy pattern.

Her fingers stiffened at the words and she wrapped them tightly around the door handle. "It's nothing to concern you," she muttered diplomatically, twisting the handle in her hands and feeling the comforting click of the door opening. "You should go back to your family, and I'll go back to mine. Don't tell anybody that this happened." She didn't even want to give a thought to what might happen if word of this reached her father.

"My family aren't here," he sighed automatically in response.

She paused, the door open just far enough to let a crack of the corridor light into her room. "That's unusual. Normally, royalty don't just send a son to represent them on foreign visits – were they busy elsewhere?"

He suddenly burst into a splutter of laughter – he had a bellowing laugh, one that seemed to fill the whole corridor with echoing sound. She immediately held up her hand frantically to stop him from making noise, but her movements were stopped by the sound of laughter. She hadn't heard it in so long. There was a part of her that decided, in that moment, she could drown in that laugh.

"Royalty?" Dalli croaked, doubled over in an attempt to regain his breath. "I'm not Groveston royalty, Elsa. I'm just one of the servants."

She halted in shock. She had simply assumed that he was some form of royalty, as he was stood in the palace, but now the scuffed shoes and slightly ragged material of his cloak began to make sense; he was a servant, and a brave one, to be wandering around the palace and speaking to princesses. Shock aside, she gave her rushed excuses and turned away again, confident that her parents had been right and that she would be best staying in her room. "I shouldn't be out here."

"You were out of your room when I found you – you must have wanted to be here. You must have wanted to come out of hiding, at least for a little while."

"I'm not hiding!" Elsa retorted hotly.

"Then what are you doing?"

"You don't understand."

"Then make me understand." There was a moment of anxious silence. "Talk to me. Stop hiding, and talk to me."

"I don't even know you."

"Not yet. You could know me."

"I don't want to."

"Don't you?"

She hesitated before giving a reply, and his face broke out into a beaming smile. "I'm not going to drag you out of this castle, Elsa," he began with a hint of playful laughter in his tone, "but if you wanted to go, then I know a place."


	3. The Obedient Daughter

"So you've been stuck in that room for years just to protect your sister?"

"It's not just for my sister," Elsa sighed, winding a worn piece of string around her fingers and keeping her gaze fixed on that – she knew that Dalli was watching her tell the story, but she didn't want to see his reaction. Seeing him evaluate her past might change her opinion on it, and she didn't want that; she already had a clear view of what had happened back then. She already had her grudges to bear. "If the public find out that I have powers, they'll cast me out. They'll be afraid of me."

"There's nothing about your powers to be afraid of, though!" Dalli exclaimed loudly, watching as the string frosted and thawed continually in her hands. Her light blonde hair was blowing gently in the sea breeze that came rolling in from the rocks below them. They were nestled into the cavern he had led them to, having carefully avoided the sight of the public, who were busy greeting their Groveston guests.

Elsa smiled at his comment, and placed the scrap of string on the cool stone floor beside her – it had frozen into a fixed shape, and she could no longer mould it to fit around her fingers. "How did you find this place?"

"I've come to Arendelle a few times before," Dalli muttered, resting the flat of his palm against the carved cavern wall. "I used to explore this place as a kid, and when I found this, I just decided to claim it as my temporary home." He shot her a sideways glance, and watched her closely as she shut her eyes and bent her chin up towards the wind. "Do you like it?"

She let out a long, tired breath. "I haven't been outside in the daylight for so long," she whispered, her voice barely audible above the whistling of the breeze over the water. "Sometimes at night, when I know that Anna's asleep and the servants are busy elsewhere, I'll walk out into the courtyard and just stand there for a little while."

"Don't any of the villagers notice you?" he asked quietly.

Elsa remained steadily still, eyes shut, hair drifting on the wind. "The gates are always shut – even in the daytime. After Anna's accident, my parents didn't want to take any chances with my powers, so they decided to close the castle to outsiders."

There was a momentary pause in the conversation as she opened her eyes and cast a confused glance at him. "How did you get in there?"

He laughed at her arched eyebrows and shifted his position. "I picked up a few bags of supplies from the ship before I left, and headed to the castle before everyone else. You should really tell the guards to be more careful – I just told them that I was bringing in the royal family's presents from Groveston, and that the gifts had to be ready by the time they returned from the docks. They let me right in."

"Why?" The question sprung from Elsa's lips before she could hold it back, but she was pleased with her own abruptness. It wasn't like her to disobey her parents – and it was even less like her to disobey them with a stranger. _Conceal, don't feel, don't let it show. _The words had floated into her consciousness from memory and they brought with them a tinge of guilt, but she tried to push it away. She just wanted a day of freedom, away from the life of the obedient daughter. Tomorrow it would be over. She just wanted today.

Dalli, for the first time since they had met, seemed lost for a response. She watched him anxiously, and for a fleeting moment, began to harbour worries of sinister intentions – what if his motive to enter the palace was not just to look around? What if he wanted to hurt her? What if he wanted to hurt _Anna?_ Her muscles tensed at just the thought, and she waited with expectation growing by the second. What if he was using this time to think of a good alibi?

"I'm not sure how to explain this," he began with stuttering insecurity. "It may sound a little . . . strange."

_So this is the alibi, then. _Elsa tried to push away those dark thoughts and nodded. She wanted to be supportive. She wanted to know more about him, but certainly didn't want to show it, and so retained some of her scepticism for his story to follow.

"Have you ever read about Groveston?" he began tentatively.

Elsa had spent hours poring through the books in her mother's huge library, picking out each tiny detail of the world outside her room. Of course she had read extensively about Groveston - however, in the hope of appearing calm, she simply nodded again.

"So you know that we are the kingdom of the oracles?" he continued.

"I've . . . I've heard of that." In truth, she had only skimmed over it once or twice in the books she had read, but it had intrigued her at the time. "But what does that mean?"

"There are a few people born into Groveston who can see things that haven't yet happened. In short, they can see into the future – not by too long a distance, mind. They simply have powers, just like you have powers." Dalli was rushing through his words as if in a hurry to push them out. He was afraid of her judgement, and afraid of how her thoughts on his people might affect his own way of thinking. He was beginning to believe that she had that kind of influence on him.

Elsa nodded slowly. This was as far as she had read in the books of her mother's library, but faced with a boy whose life had been centred on the ways and traditions of the oracles, she was thirsty for more information. "Are you an oracle?"

He patted one hand uncomfortably over his matted black hair, trying to mould it into some degree of order but failing miserably. "Yes," he sighed eventually.

She was confused by his shame. "Aren't you proud of it?" She caught a glance of the gloves covering her hands as she looked out to the fjord, and pondered for a moment whether he was in the same situation as her – born with powers, but forced to hide them for the sake of reputation. But no, that couldn't be true when he came from the kingdom of oracles!

Dalli shook his head for a moment. "I'm not proud of it right now."

She didn't need to enquire for him to know that a further explanation was needed; she blinked at him once, twice, in the hope of clarification.

"I had a vision while I was on the ship over here. It's the most vivid one I've had in years – most of the time, they're just a blurry mess with a few distinguishable faces, but I swear that I could pick out _every wave_ in this one." He hesitated and licked his lips nervously. "I was walking off the ship in Arendelle with a few bags of supplies, pushing through the crowd and heading straight for the castle. When I got there, I got through the gates easily by talking to the guards, and I ran through the courtyard until I got inside. I knew exactly where to go, even though I've never been into your castle before, and I kept going until I got to your door. I didn't even know it was your door then – the vision just showed me waiting behind a statue in the hall until you came out."

Elsa was silent for a long while. If she had ever learnt from a book in the library or a gaze from her bedroom window about how to deal with the vivid visions of an oracle, then it had disappeared from her memory like sand slipping through her fingers with the jolt of surprise. With time to recollect herself and make some sense of what had been said, she turned her blue eyes on his with a questioning stare. "So what does this mean?"

"The vision?" he stammered. "Well – well, this is why I was afraid to tell you."

She didn't move her gaze from his, though he was prone to flinching and fidgeting beneath her eyes. "Just tell me, Dalli."

"They say that a Groveston vision represents fate – no matter what happens leading up to the moment that a vision predicts, what has been seen by an oracle will always be true." He paused to gauge her face; she seemed to understand, and so he continued. "So if – well, because my vision represents fate, that means that we were destined to meet. We were brought together."

Elsa narrowed her eyes instinctively. "Why? Is there any reason why we should be brought together? Did the vision show you anything else?"

"No, there was nothing else," he responded rapidly – her empty confusion was swiftly manifesting itself into anger, and he was immediately wary that it would be directed at him. "I just knew that I had to go to the castle today and meet you. There must be something planned in the future for us that we cannot know now."

"You can't make yourself have another one of these visions?" she asked frantically. "You can't summon one up and see what's meant to happen next?"

Dalli shook his head. "You can only see what fate wants you to see. An oracle cannot force himself to have a vision."

She slowly sank down on to the cool rock of the cavern floor, and shut her eyes. Just the sound of the fjord seemed to calm her, though her heart was still thumping in her chest as if trying to break free of its cage. Her father had always said that she had a hummingbird heart – the memory was somewhat comforting to her fraught emotions, but useless now, in the face of this revelation.

They sat in silence as the day swam into the afternoon. Though she wanted to keep her powers under control for the time being, she couldn't help them from reacting to her emotions and scratching frosted swirls on the cavern ceiling. After a length of time too long for Dalli to count, Elsa piped up with a further thought: "So what do we do now?"

"We stay together."

She frowned at him, and he could see the fragility she was desperate to hide shining behind the false bravery in her eyes. "That's an impossible solution. My powers are too dangerous for you to be around me – you could get hurt."

"If a prophecy has stated that our fate is to stick together, then we should risk everything for that. That would include the risk of getting hurt." He kept her gaze steadily, and she felt her heart sinking in her chest; of course, he was the one with the experience in the area of prophecies. She should follow his advice.

"And how long do we have to go around with each other before we find out what this is for?" she asked impatiently.

"For as long as it takes for life to work itself out." He seemed to have become philosophical and fatalistic about the lives they would have to lead from now on. "We will know, in the end, what fate wants from us. Now, though, we just have to live like this and see where the prophecy leads us."

Elsa caught his gaze, which had been flitting nervously from wall to wall, and held it for a few moments. "So what do you suggest we do now?"

Dalli tried to send her a confident smile, but it wavered slightly at the edges with his obvious lack of confidence. "I think there's only one thing we can do if we want fate to run its course. We should go back to the castle."

* * *

**Author's Note:** Hey there! I wanted to add a note like this to the previous two chapters, but always forgot to do it before publishing it, so it looks as if I'll have to put everything I wanted to say into this little bit. Firstly, thanks for reading up to this point! I'm pretty excited about this story, so please stay tuned if you want to learn a bit more about how this Dalli bloke will affect Elsa's life - and believe me, he will. Also, I've been a member of FF for quite a while but have fallen in and out of love with the stories I've written and have gradually posted and deleted all of them over the years, so this is my first attempt at a new story in a couple of years now. I decided to come back to it as a bit of fun, because as my schoolwork has been getting more stressful, I realised that I needed some kind of escape from it - and that escape came in the form of Frozen, which I saw the other day and absolutely LOVED. As school's out for a bit now, I've got a bit of time on my hands to write this, but when I go back in early January, updates may become less frequent - we'll have to see how it goes. Anyway, this has been really long and I didn't intend it to be as huge as this, but again, thanks for reading. Please leave a review if you enjoyed it! :)


	4. Following Instincts

Though Elsa had lived for all of her near-eighteen years in Arendelle, her only knowledge of the network of villages that surrounded the castle came from patches of worn-out memory. She had spent an uncountable amount of time memorising all the maps that she could find, but in practise, all the little alleys seemed to blend into each other and become indistinguishable. All she knew of the land that surrounded the castle was derived from the scraps of flotsam at the edge of her memory, from the time when she and Anna used to play around these places, and those were unreliably faint.

Dalli seemed to know the place better from his previous visits, and he carefully selected deserted backstreets to travel down just in case they were spotted by any of the public – for her safety, of course. She had spent so long hidden away from the villagers that there would be a flurry if she was spotted, and closer to her heart was the issue of her powers; emotion played too huge a part in her ability to control them for her to be comfortable amongst the public yet.

She followed him silently and trusted that they would be back at the castle before anybody spotted their absence, but her mind felt alive with the sparks of ideas and theories. She found it difficult to believe that she had woken up that morning, a day from eighteen and expecting another day of solitude, and now she was sneaking back into the castle with a stranger.

Anna's face popped into her mind, and the thought seemed to puncture her excitement. She had hidden herself from her younger sister for so long that their lives seemed to be distinctly separate, like two orbiting moons that could never align. She had refused every offer, turned away to every knock on the door – she had taken every meal in her room and only left at night in the hope of protecting Anna from the powers she possessed. Now, she was risking all those years of vigilant avoidance for the sake of one day with an oracle. It didn't seem fair on her sister.

"Slow down!" she called out to Dalli, who was already a few paces ahead along an alleyway that stretched behind the market. He had almost been jogging in an attempt to return them home swiftly but without being seen, and he swerved back to retrace his steps when he heard her call out to him. Elsa had slowed to a halt, and was holding on to one of the bricks in the wall that made up a villager's home. She hoped momentarily that there was nobody in it now.

He peered down at her with a look of concern. "We're almost back now – we can be there in time for lunch, if we hurry. They'll need me to serve the starter course as usual, but I doubt they'll have missed me before that . . ."

"Stop," she wheezed, holding a finger to the air in front of him. She hadn't realised how out of breath she was until she was stood in that alley, clasping her knees and puffing out huge breaths of flurried air, sprinkled with flakes of crystallised snow. "I just need to think for a little bit."

Dalli watched as the brick she was clasping slowly frosted over, despite the day being quite warm and autumnal. "I know that this feels strange right now, but it's right. There must be something bigger out there for us."

"It's not that," Elsa replied in an abrupt retort. "I just can't stop thinking about Anna. I followed you out here without even knowing who you are, and yet she's my sister and I haven't seen her in years. Why?"

"Because she's your sister," he said matter-of-factly. "Right now, your powers are so strong that you could hurt her, and you want to keep her safe. It wouldn't matter if I got hurt - like you said, you don't even know me."

She shook her head and cast a hopeless glance at the ice spreading across the brick wall. "I don't want anybody to suffer because of my powers, and that includes strangers." She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, blowing tiny frozen flakes into the breeze. "I just . . . I followed an instinct to come out here. That's not something that I usually do any more."

"Was it a bad instinct?" he enquired softly.

"No!" she exclaimed. "It just wasn't a responsible one."

There was a moment of quiet between them, and Elsa looked up to gauge Dalli's expression. He was watching her sympathetically, and carefully examining the icy pattern growing on the wall. "Look," he began cautiously, "it's clear that you love your sister. It's very clear that if you didn't have your powers any more, the first person you'd speak to would be her, and not a stranger. But that's not going to happen, because you still have your powers. That's why I think you spoke to me – because some part of you knew that I might be able to help."

She shot him a puzzled expression. "I don't understand."

"I'll explain it when we reach the castle, but time's getting on and they'll be serving up lunch soon – we'd better be back before anyone realises that we're missing." He tried to smile comfortingly, though he was just as uncertain about what they were doing as she was, and held out a hand to help her up. She cautiously accepted it and withdrew her other hand from the wall, leaving the spread of ice there to gradually melt into the gutter.

Elsa had barely shut the bedroom door behind her when there was a knock from the other side. For a moment, she thought that it might be Anna, and her heart skipped with fear – her situation was complicated enough without the added factor of her sister's wellbeing – but the cheery voice of a servant drifted through the wood, and she felt a rush of relief.

"I have your meal, Your Highness," called the woman in a sing-song voice which sounded familiar, though her father rotated the servants' rota often so that she could never become too familiar with any of them. She had sometimes considered this to be a blatant attempt to keep her isolated, but a glance at her gloves reminded her in an instant of Anna's accident and her need to be alone – the servants of the castle, just like everybody else, had to be protected from her powers.

She nervously smoothed the crumpled material of her dress and took a few deep breaths. She tried to assess her appearance in the mirror from the imagined perspective of the servant who waited outside, wondering if they would be able to tell that she had just come back. There were a few loose strands of hair dangling over her face that she tried to sweep back into her plaited bun, but other than that, she could pass as simply being a little scruffy.

Though she was still alone for the moment, she put on the brightest smile she could muster from within her inner reserve of false expressions, and tugged her lilac gloves further up her forearms. "Come in," she called out, and watched as the door swung up to reveal a plump, grinning servant.

"Good afternoon, Princess!" the servant exclaimed loudly with a beaming smile. She turned her back to Elsa momentarily to grab the handles of a metallic mobile serving tray, engraved with ornate little waves and ships – if the historical knowledge of one of the first of her servants to use this tray was correct, then it was a trade gift from the royal family of a kingdom many miles down the fjord. This fact always leapt into her mind when she saw the tray being rolled into her room. "Your lunch is served. Would you like to hear what's on the menu?"

"It's fish soup and bread today," Elsa replied immediately, having memorised the menu many years ago after taking so many meals in her room. She saw the momentary look of shock on the servant's face, and it jolted her memory; the name _Abeline_ jumped to her lips. "Thank you, Abeline."

The expression of surprise on the servant's face was replaced by a wider grin. "You're welcome, Your Highness," she giggled, pushing the tray further into the room and laying out its dishes on the dining table. "Now, your father said that he'd already asked you this, but the chef wanted some clarification. As it is your eighteenth birthday tomorrow, is there anything in particular that you'd like to eat?"

Her father hadn't asked her anything, but she wasn't offended by his assumption of her response; it was the same answer to the same question every year. "I don't want anything special," she said with a well-rehearsed smile. "Just prepare the usual."

"Very good," Abeline replied. She had already begun to wheel the tray back out of the room, and was halfway through the doorway when she seemed to have an idea and pause for a moment. The tray was left to keep the door open as she turned with an intrigued expression to meet Elsa's gaze. "Will you still be taking your meals in here tomorrow?"

"Yes," the princess replied.

"So you'll still eat on your own, even though it's your birthday?"

Elsa shot her a bittersweet smile, and nodded. "Yes. I simply prefer it this way." _No, I don't. _Mental comments aside, the conversation was over, and Abeline gave her one last brief smile before wheeling the tray out and shutting the door behind her.

Lunch was a noisy time of the day – the servants often used the time to clean the corridors, as the rest of the royal family were dining downstairs and so were out of the way. Due to the extra guests from Groveston, the staff had presumably been given especially strict orders as to how clean the castle should be, and so Elsa spent her mealtime listening to the whirring and scraping of the cleaners as they worked.

The lunch downstairs in the dining room must have lasted for a long time, because after the servants had finished their cleaning duties, they had time to linger in the corridors and murmur in hushed voices. She couldn't help but wonder if Dalli was on another corridor in the castle somewhere, doing exactly what the servants outside her door were doing. He had promised to return to her room the next morning if there were no witnesses to prevent it, and she began to contemplate what it was that he was going to explain in the alley.

She allowed herself a moment of daydreaming about what the morning would bring, and without realising it, a storm began to swirl around her. It began as just a few flakes drifting from her fingertips into the summer air, but it grew beyond her control as greater winter winds began to sweep through the room from the palms of her hands. She wasn't making it happen, but there was something about the strength of the emotion forcing this tundra to exist that just made her unwilling to stop it. She knew her limits – if she truly wanted to, she could draw it all back in and make it stop, but she was comfortable for now.

"Elsa?"

She knew the voice that was coming from the other side of her door, and with a jolt, she got to her feet.

"Elsa, are you in there?"

The snowstorm was still swirling around her and she waved her hands frantically in an attempt to settle it, but it only grew at the sound of the voice. The motion of her hands only served to encourage it, and a thin layer of ice began to creep up the walls around her.

"I can't be out here for too long. Let me in!"

With a deep breath, she accepted that the visitor would just have to see the storm. She couldn't stop it now – hopelessly and frighteningly, it was out of her control.

She wrapped one icy hand around the door handle, which froze immediately at her shaky touch, and pulled the door towards her. Out in the corridor, stood with his arms folded, was Dalli.

He stopped and stared at the snow in silence for a few tense moments, mouth open in surprise. She waited for his reaction – or, more precisely, she waited for him to see the uncontrollable state of the storm and leave for fear of his own life.

"Well . . . aren't you going to let me in?"

Elsa blinked in shock. "You want to come in?"

He smiled in return. "That's what I'm here for. But if it's alright with you, I might have to be quick – I still have my duties to Groveston, even if I'd rather be up here."

"You don't mind – well – this?" she exclaimed, indicating to the storm around her.

He took a second glance at the wintry conditions, and shook his head. "The cold never bothered me."

And with that, he entered.


	5. Gloves and Closed Doors

"You wanted to know why we had been chosen for the prophecy – why the vision included us two, instead of anybody else."

Elsa nodded at Dalli's words and listened intently, despite being unable to ignore the flecks of snow that were so apparent on his shock of black hair. He was subtly shivering beneath his cloak, which he had slung roughly over his shoulders as soon as he entered – beneath it were the tattered garments of a servant, dotted with the reflective gems that he had said were commonplace in Groveston. She had tried continually to stop the storm, but her efforts only made it worse, and he always insisted that she shouldn't.

"Well," he continued, sat opposite her around the dining table in her room, "something just occurred to me when you were talking about Anna, and how you haven't seen her in years. What if I had that vision because I was chosen, by fate or something like that, to help you? What if I'm the only one who can get you out of this situation?"

She frowned at him in puzzlement. "What if I don't want to get out of 'this situation', as you call it?" There was a sharp edge to her voice, as if she was warning him that he was stepping over her line of tolerance; they had still only known each other for a day. He didn't know her life, and he couldn't assume that she needed rescuing from it – even if, internally, she agreed with him.

He shot her a look of disbelief. "Elsa, you're unhappy."

The statement was enough to send the storm into a surge, and a harsh wind cut past Dalli in the freezing air that almost swept his cloak from his shoulders. "You don't know what I am," she snarled. "You don't know me!"

"It doesn't take long to spot!" he retorted, though his words were somewhat muffled by the chattering of his teeth. "You've been so busy trying to keep your parents happy and keep everybody else safe that you've forgotten about your own feelings! If you really were happy, you wouldn't have come with me this morning."

"That's unfair!" The storm was rapidly spinning out of control, which a thick layer of snow building up around their feet. She grunted in frustration as she contorted her hands in the air, trying to find some solution for the chaos of her powers.

"That's the truth!"

Elsa shook her head slowly, eyes flickering with anger. "It's not my truth." She turned away in frustration, and watched silently as the flurry of snowflakes gradually died down. They sat for a minute without speaking before she had calmed enough to look at him again. "My happiness doesn't matter. It's my duty that matters."

"You don't have to be miserable just because you've got a duty, Elsa." He was softly-spoken, and she took comfort in that though she was too stubborn to show it – it had been a long time since she was treated with sympathy. Her parents weren't usually the most gentile of speakers, as their eyes were focused solely on her role in Arendelle and not her role in their family. "You don't have to feel guilty about your powers."

"My powers have put everybody I love in danger." She hung her head and pretended to be closely examining her boots, though she had seen them thousands of times before. The woven trim on the toes was turning white as it collected snow. "They'll put you in danger too if you stay here long enough. You're clearly freezing – why don't you just go?"

He gave her a soft smile and stopped tugging at his cloak to readjust it. "I'll admit that I've been to warmer places," he began sardonically, "but I won't leave unless you want me to." He paused and assumed a serious expression for a second. "Do you really want me to?"

She didn't reply but kept staring at her boots, which he took fondly to be a rejection of the idea.

"In which case, I'm going to tell you why I've come – and please, I know that we've only just met, but listen to me for a little while." His mouth twisted into a half-smile as he saw her gaze flicker upwards for a few seconds; if he had her attention, she was too stubborn to show it, but he quietly admired that about her. She had a certain spirit which he could not define but wanted to see more of, and so he was prepared to make his case thoroughly.

Elsa's gaze flitted past his once as if she might interrupt, but due to her continual silence, he started with his explanation. He had taken on a more gentle tone with her in the hope that she would react less strongly to his words this time – not just for the sake of her emotion, but also for the sake that his cloak was alarmingly thin and a further surge in the storm might freeze the very breath blasting from his nose in bursts of steam.

"I think that your powers are beautiful. If you don't share that opinion – and I fear that you don't – then just look around you, Elsa. Look at this storm! There aren't many people out there who have the kind of talent to create a whole winter in an afternoon."

He thought briefly that he heard her snort faintly with laughter but when he looked up from the table to check, her face had returned to its well-rehearsed state of stoic control; slightly comforted by the reaction he was sure he heard, he continued.

"I know that your parents don't want you to use these powers because you don't quite know how to control them yet, and I can understand that. Your sister was hurt because your powers got out of hand, and you feel guilty about the accident. I understand that too. What I don't understand is why you should allow your powers to go unpractised and untamed, covered up by gloves and closed doors all the time, when you could be using this time to learn about it."

Her gaze was becoming decidedly steely once more, and he quickly rushed to regain her support.

"That's what I think the vision was for – that's why I came up to the castle before everybody else, and why you came out of the door at just the right time to meet me. It was just a series of coincidences up until that point, but now I'm here and now this is happening." He held up an icy hand and gathered a handful of snow in his palm, staring at it in awe. "These are your powers, Elsa, and I think they're brilliant. I want to help you think that way as well."

She looked up for a few brief moments of tense silence as he awaited her evaluation. They shared eye contact, and neither blinked nor looked away; they were merely examining each other. They were testing each other's patience – and Dalli took that as a sign that she was prepared to at least try.

At last, Elsa cleared her throat. "It's a pleasant idea, Dalli," she responded in as controlled a voice as she could muster – it was the voice she had inherited and learned to use from a young age, even before Anna's accident. It was the steady, almost nonchalant voice of the reluctant royal. "However, I must refuse the offer."

"Why?" His outburst was unnervingly instinctive but still necessary in his mind. He had wanted to slam his fist down on the table at the same time to emphasise his point, but he was aware of the trotting of heeled feet in the corridor as a servant passed the door and didn't want to alert anybody of their discussion. "Don't you believe that this is fate?"

"I believe that it's what you said: a series of coincidences." She was holding her chin up - so high that it seemed to be a parody of her own regal habits - in the hope that it might allow her to feel somewhat confident and authoritative. "I had fun today, but it was just a day. You'll be gone in less than a week and no matter how enthusiastic you are about . . ." She simply gestured to the snow around her. "There would just be no point."

_I don't have to leave._ The thought popped into his mind as soon as she suggested it but Dalli kept it behind his tongue and away from the chilly air in speech. It was his strongly-held belief that any obstacle could be overcome if he was truly passionate about it – or, in this case, if he was truly passionate about Elsa.

Was he?

Thankfully for his frayed thoughts, the question could be put off until later when he would be on his own, because now he could see Elsa standing. She held one hand out in the direction of the door, and assumed the posture of a true royal, who was well-trained in the traditions of her regal blood but still retained some vague humanity.

"You said that you didn't have long," Elsa smiled in a contained way, as if she was not truly looking at him but through him, at the ice that was creeping up the wall behind his back. "I have a governess coming in a few minutes anyway to continue with my lessons, so I think it would be best if you'd go."

Dalli stood and observed her sudden change in character in confused amazement, before accepting defeat and moving towards the exit. "I'll leave because you want me to go, Elsa," he muttered in a final statement. "I won't come back unless you want me to come. But could you remember one thing for me?"

A slight tinge of the real Elsa, the Elsa that had sat in the cavern with him, returned to her face as she leaned gently towards him. "What is it?" she asked curiously.

"You're not happy." His eyes met sharply with hers and she flinched, but refused to look away. "When you stop denying that, then maybe you can change it. You don't always have to be unhappy, Elsa, and you don't always have to be alone." She finally broke the eye contact and stared at the floor. "If you want to change it, then I'm easy to find."

With those words burning in the chilly air, she pulled weakly at the door handle and allowed it to swing open in front of him. She still refused to look into his eyes but bashfully muttered a half-hearted goodbye as he walked out, and shut the door behind him.

When the lock had clicked and she was separated from the corridor by a door and a reputation, she finally sank to her knees against the frozen wood, and wept.


	6. Not The First

When Elsa woke up the next day, it was long past dawn, and she could already hear the distant squeals of playing children coming from her window. She blinked once, twice, trying to clear the mist from her bleary eyes; when she could finally focus, she noticed that the curtains were drawn back and the window open.

It only took her a few more moments to turn her head sleepily away from the window and realise that her parents were standing eagerly at the end of her bed.

The shock of their presence sent a tiny jolt of ice sparking through her fingers and a burst of snow from her palms – she quietly took relief in the fact that her hands were hidden under the duvet then, out of sight from her parents. "What are you doing here?" she asked in a croaking voice.

"Happy birthday!" boomed her father, grinning and holding out his hands as if already presenting her with an imaginary gift.

"Happy birthday, Elsa," added her mother more subtly, grasping her husband's arm in a limitative way as if to restrain his excitement. They embarked valiantly on a rendition of the traditional song, but Elsa quickly withdrew a hand from underneath the covers to stop their efforts.

"No, no, don't worry about that," she groaned in as genial a manner as she could muster. In doubtful hope, she peered around her parents and inspected the rest of the room in case her sister was there. "Is Anna not here?" She tried to make her tone sound casually nonchalant – the effort wasn't convincing.

Her parents cast a quick glance at each other before her father shook his head sadly, arms folded across his chest. "Anna can't be here, Elsa. You know that."

_Of course I know it_, she mentally remarked, _but I don't know why._ After a tense pause, her mother reached into a bag that was resting at the end of the bed, and withdrew a beautifully wrapped parcel. "We just brought a little gift for you to open in your room – when you're ready, you can come down to the throne room and open the rest."

Elsa looked up abruptly. There was a pause as she watched their expressions. "You're saying that I should leave my room?"

Her mother gave a faint smile but seemed to stumble over her words as she tried to respond, and so her father took over. "We thought you might like to take a look around the castle – it seems like you haven't been out in so long." His words were hurried slightly and he was rubbing his hands together with nerves, as if he was promising something that was not quite as it seemed.

Hiding the small burst of glee that her father's statement had brought her – if only they knew how recently she had seen their kingdom in daylight, having visited the cavern yesterday with Dalli – Elsa frowned. "Does this mean that I can see Anna today, or some of the villagers?" Her expectations were rapidly rising.

Her parents looked at each other again in a momentary hesitation. "Not quite," her father added in what he hoped was a diplomatic tone. They watched in despair as their daughter's face dropped with disappointment, and so he quickly gave their explanation. "We don't do this to be cruel, Elsa. We do this because your powers are dangerous, and we don't want anybody to get hurt."

Dalli's words sprung with a sudden flash of vibrancy into Elsa's mind, and the blurry events of the previous day snapped into brilliant focus in memory – the storm and the argument that had caused him to leave seemed just as sharp to her now as they had been when she suffered them yesterday. She tried to hold back the recollection and focus on her father's words, but it was almost impossible when the two seemed so connected; he had told her that she was unhappy and she had furiously denied it, but the feeling that was throbbing in her heart now certainly didn't feel like happiness.

Elsa took one deep breath, examined the expressions of her parents, and reminded herself of the role she had to play. She was heir to the throne; she had to be responsible. This was a mantra she had often found herself repeating in her mind, just to guard her thoughts from the usual feelings of loneliness that crept up on her during the long days; it seemed to be less effective in quelling her fears today, but she swallowed her protests and made an effort to look pleased with the gift her mother was holding.

"Well, aren't you going to let me open it?" she asked with faux impatience. Her parents – who were perhaps expecting a repeat of her sixteenth birthday, when a single pair of gloves had sent her bawling into the courtyard – sighed in relief, and her mother quickly passed her the present.

The parcel was decorated in beautiful gold and silver, adorned with tiny inked pictures of various gemstones. It felt smooth against her fingers but the tension that had refused to subside in her stomach seemed to spread to her fingertips, and a small sheet of frost began to creep over the package. Elsa quickly tried to hide that by ripping through the paper – with a quick glance up to her parents, she could tell that her father had seen the frost, but they were both too polite to mention it.

Beneath the paper was a square box, decorated with the same pattern but covered in real gemstones instead of sketched depictions. "It's beautiful," she remarked as she carefully untied the deep purple ribbon that held the box together and lifted its lid.

Inside, beneath layers of perfectly folded tissue paper and slivers of shiny confetti, was a slightly tattered book. It was leather-bound and as Elsa ran her fingers delicately against its cover, she could feel the tiny wrinkles in the material. The worn colour of the book seemed to suggest that she was not the first to run her hands over it.

As she withdrew it from the box, her father smiled with pride. "It was your great-grandfather's diary, Elsa," he murmured in a quiet voice, as if the book was too precious for loud or vulgar noises. "He kept diaries through all the years he was king, and we both agreed that you should have this one – consider it a family heirloom."

Her eyes were wide with admiration for the book, which was slightly broader than the palm of her hand but small enough for her to read easily. She flipped through the pages with gentle fingers and smiled at every handwritten word, etched into the withered pages alongside blots of stray ink and the occasional diagram. "This is amazing!" she whispered.

"It's yours to keep," her mother added with a grin. "There are plenty more in the library, but we didn't want you or Anna to read them before you were ready – I know that Anna in particular can be a little clumsy sometimes, and King Alfred's diaries are practically national artefacts."

The king nodded. "The one that you're holding only covers a month towards the beginning of his reign, but we wanted to start you off slow. There is plenty of wisdom even in one month of King Alfred's life," he said.

"I love it," Elsa returned. She kept leafing fervently through the delicate, almost leaf-like pages, as if waiting for some of that fabled wisdom to leap out at her. "Thank you so much."

Her parents simply smiled at her and began to head towards the door, watching her gladly as she examined the diary. "As we said, you should come to the throne room when you're ready to open your main presents," her father repeated as he opened the door for the queen. "Don't rush, though. Take your time with old Alfred."

She laughed and held up a hand in farewell. As the door shut behind them, she was tempted just to stay in bed and read the diary for a while – but, as her father had stated, it only covered a month of King Alfred's life. She wanted to savour every page, and so she carefully placed it on the bedside table and got up to get ready for the day.

When she heard the abrupt knock on her door, Elsa assumed that it would be her parents, as they had only just left. Perhaps her mother had mislaid her bag on the dining table and forgotten to take it with her, as sometimes occurred; perhaps her father had one final note about King Alfred's diary. Regardless of the reason, she swung the door open almost carelessly, and expected to see the faces of her parents waiting there.

Instead, there was nobody in the corridor. The whole space seemed to be silent, aside from the distant clacking of a servant's heels against the wooden flooring. She leaned forward to peer carefully to her right and left, checking that her visitor hadn't simply walked a little way away – and still, she couldn't see anybody. All she could see, when she looked down to her bare feet, was a small brown box.

She picked it up and inspected it. The box was slightly scuffed around the edges and wasn't decorated at all, with only a few strands of brown straw used as a makeshift ribbon to tie it up. Attached to the straw was a rectangular white tag, which was creased a little at two corners.

_Dear Elsa,_

_I hope you are alright after yesterday. I know that I should have delivered this gift in person, but I thought that a princess might be busy on her birthday with official engagements, so I wanted to just leave you this. It's not much, but I hope it will help – remember what I said._

_Dalli._

Elsa quickly withdrew herself back into her room and shut the door. If Dalli was hiding in the corridor again as he had when they met, she didn't want to see him – she was in two minds about whether she wanted to see him again at all. Nevertheless, the tag had intrigued her, and so she carried the box in one hand to her dining table.

The straw only took a few moments to rip away, and though the lid seemed a little too small for its box, it slid off with a little encouragement. There was no tissue paper or confetti in this parcel – only a little black book, lying there at the bottom at a slight angle.

For a fleeting moment, she wondered if this was another diary of King Alfred – for a further terrifying second, she imagined that Dalli might have stolen it from the library. However, when she picked it up to flip through its contents, it was entirely empty. It only had a set of thin grey lines on each white page, and the word 'DIARY' stamped slightly unevenly on to its wooden front.

Elsa looked to the bedside table, at her great-grandfather's own unstamped diary. She looked back to the diary that Dalli had given her. She couldn't help but feel a slight tingle of trepidation as she compared the two, and a thin sprinkling of snow began to fall in her bedroom; the day seemed to bring not only a new age, but a new chapter about to unfold in her life.


	7. May 2nd, 1923

**May 2****nd****, 1923**

I have to admit that I am writing out of duty rather than will today – a situation that has unfortunately occurred more and more since the coronation. It pains me further to admit that Gwen has retired early, which I cannot blame her for, instead of staying up in the lounge to wait for me. She's probably asleep as I'm writing this – in fact, I would bet that all of Arendelle is asleep but I. Such is a king's duty, as my father would say.

Father visited my quarters this morning in the hope of speaking with me, but the butler had to turn him away as I was deep in a debate with the Ambassador of Weselton. I sent him a note of apology after the Ambassador had left my office, but I distinctly recall that he was taking Mother to the theatre today, and I expect that he was too tired upon their return to respond. Of course, seeing him contented in his retirement brings me happiness, but only Mother seems to understand that this happiness is overpowered by my burden as king.

I took my evening meal only with Mother and Gwen today, as dear little Sophia is still too sick to join us. I have told the nanny on several occasions that I would happily visit the nursery and risk catching the terrible cough that Sophia has contracted, as it seems so cruel to keep her locked away like this; alas, the nanny was quite adamant that it is best to keep her separate from the rest of us. Gwen agreed, and told me that my duties as king would be put into jeopardy if I caught the illness. As always, my duties seem to come before my family.

Gwen wanted to take a bath after dinner as she was to host a small gathering in the second lounge for her ladies' club this evening, and so I had some time to sit with Mother. I told her about Sophia's illness and the upkeep of the kingdom – occasionally we drifted into discussion of my own wellbeing, but I am making a conscious effort to discuss less of that with Mother, who has probably suffered enough of my whining to last a lifetime. I expect that Father gave her plenty of his own grievances to bear when he was king, and I daren't burden her with more.

After the meal, we both settled in the lounge, and Mother asked me what I was set to do later in the evening. I told her with a guilty heart – how curious that even at the age of 21 and king, I am still terrified of the judgement of my mother – that I had a commitment to fulfil but one that I did not want to carry out. Naturally, she enquired as to what it was, and so I told her of that funny visit I had from the President of the Arendelle Farmers' Union last week. I believe that I wrote about it at the time, but not in full detail, as it pained me to describe it. Here is my second, more honest attempt:

The President, a stout man with constant colour in his cheeks and clad in the slightly worn garments of an agricultural man, had scheduled a meeting with me a few months ago in order to discuss their trade situation. The meeting took place this Monday, and as it was my first encounter with a union during my time as monarch, I was naturally a little intimidated – however, these minor worries were expelled when I welcomed him into my office, as he was a warm and charming gentleman.

The warmth of his manner seemed not to transfer to his business; as I tried to be diplomatic with him and offer him the best tax reductions that I could for his industry, he grew more and more irate. At one point I was tempted to ring the bell for the butler to come and rescue me from his wrath, for I was sure that he might leap up across the desk and grab me by the collar at any moment. He managed to keep his temper, but I was left quite shaken by his radical demands – he informed me of the 'huge changes' that he wanted to see in Arendelle, and I, five months into my service, felt quite overwhelmed.

Mother listened patiently to my ordeal and, after it was over, she took a few minutes to contemplate her response. She then asked me why it was that I was afraid of those radical agricultural changes that the President of the Union wished to see.

Well, that question knocked the wind right out of me! I spent a short amount of time in silence feeling a little betrayed, because in a childish way, I was angered by my mother's questioning of my antics rather than an immediate rejection of this man's ridiculous ideas. Once I had gathered myself and regained some maturity, I told her that I simply could not see the ideas working for Arendelle as a whole.

Mother asked me why I felt that way, and I replied quite hot-headedly that my years of academic study taught me that these new initiatives simply would not help our kingdom. As always, she remained calm, and asked me whether any such initiatives had been tested in the past and proven inappropriate for our circumstances. I told her that no, no such initiatives had ever been used in Arendelle, but I simply did not agree with them.

Then she assumed the look which I am sure I have written about before. It is the look that states quite simply: _I am about to impart a great deal of well-earned wisdom to you._ She told me that when Father was king, he had faced a similar situation with the Association of Northern Ice Traders over forty years ago. She told me about the 1877 Ice Trade Agreement which I, in my youth, had studied intensely.

From this moment, I knew which conclusion her advice would lead to and I was prepared to accept it gracefully, but I listened to her retell the story anyway. I am well-acquainted with the flourishing ice industry that the law introduced – but the knowledge that my father had struggled for many months over whether to even allow the law to pass was new to my ears. Much the same as I had this week, he had sat through a meeting with the President of the Association of Northern Ice Traders then, and had been told of how desperately a change was needed. After time, Father took a risk and passed the law. Trade tripled, and the economy boomed with the increased production of the local ice-pickers – and I, many decades later, no longer dreaded my impending telephone call to the President to discuss the current situation.

I thanked Mother for her time, and she rushed off with Father to the theatre, but not before she could give me a fond farewell. Perhaps my rather affectionate side comes from dear Mother, for I longed at the time to share a similar embrace with little Sophia – if only the nanny would allow such luxuries at present.

After her departure, I made the telephone call to the President, and an agreement was reached within a single hour. We have arranged to meet at the castle tomorrow, and I am pleased to write that my dread has been converted to a kind of pleasant anticipation. I acknowledge that this is a risk, but it is a risk that I must take. In the long run, it could help Arendelle, and what kind of royal would I be if I declined the opportunity to help my people?

The day has been a successful but tiring one, and sleep will undoubtedly come to me easily tonight. What's more, I can sleep soundly in the knowledge that Arendelle is surely headed for better times with this trade agreement – and that is enough to make my duties feel a little lighter on my shoulders now. The issue of Sophia's illness still weighs on my mind, but I passed the nanny in the corridor after speaking with Mother this evening and I was reassured that my darling girl should be better within a few days. Until then, Gwen and I shall just have to wait.

Alfred

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thanks for reading this chapter! Please leave a review if you enjoyed it, because so far I'm really enjoying just writing this story! I just felt that I should add a little note at the end of this chapter about time: as mentioned above, this is an entry from King Alfred's diary, dated 1923, when the king was 21 and five months into his monarchy. I basically calculated that this would be around the right time for Elsa's great-grandfather to be about if she was 21 in 2013, when the film was released, and therefore 18 in 2010. I realise that the film may not necessarily be set in 2013, but I just wanted to clarify that I'm not making a modern version of Frozen – I'm still using the same clothing styles and kind of olde-worlde feel of the original. This is the kind of little detail that might bother me if it was written into somebody else's story, so I thought I'd clear it up now. Okay, thanks! :)


	8. It's Fate, Remember?

Dusk was settling over the castle by the time Elsa had finished opening her presents. The day had been spent in the throne room with her parents, opening the gifts and then promptly writing thank-you notes for all of them. She was grateful, of course, but the pleasure of being out of her room for the day was dulled by the fact that she could not get Dalli's words out of her head.

Neither, she realised, could she forget the words she had read from King Alfred's diary before she had left her room that morning. There was a single phrase that kept swirling around in her mind, attaching itself to her memory of Dalli's face: _what kind of royal would I be if I declined the opportunity to help my people?_ Wasn't that what Dalli had offered her – a chance to help the people by taming her unruly powers?

The afternoon dragged on into dusk, but the day was livened by the conflict in her head. She now had a choice to make, and her only guidance came from the words of a diary that was almost one hundred years old; she could ignore Dalli's gift and keep pretending that she was happy, or she could accept his offer and the risks that came with it. When her parents finally allowed her to leave their company, her mind had been made up.

"I'll escort you back to your room, Elsa," her father said as he rose from his throne, gesturing to his wife so that she would remain seated. The offer sounded kind, but Elsa was painfully aware of its more practical meaning – he didn't want her to be seen in the corridors by any of the servants, in case her powers spun out of control again. She had managed to keep them under wraps all day, with only a few flurries of snow appearing from her palms every now and again, but they were unpredictable and he knew that all too well.

However, her decision about Dalli had led to the formulation of a plan in her mind, and it would not allow for her father's accompaniment. "It's alright, Father," she replied with a smile. Her new cloak from the royal family of Groveston, made of almost the same material as Dalli's but richer in tone and covered in more gemstones, was lying on the arm of her chair and she gathered it up in her arms, ready to leave. "I'll be careful."

He opened his mouth to protest, but her mother laid a gentle hand on his arm and he let out a sigh of compliance. "Alright," he muttered. "In which case, I shall pass on your regards to the King of Groveston for that beautiful cloak."

Elsa nodded and examined the intricate pattern that adorned the cloak's surface, rubbing her thumb over the smooth material. "Tell Anna that I loved her gift, too." She grinned appreciatively at the framed painting that was leaning against the wall, and though it was too distant to see now, she recalled Anna's scribbled signature at its bottom-right corner. It showed a beautiful winter scene, with an icy blue lake and snow-covered white trees. She felt a sharp pain in the pit of her stomach when she saw the faint outline of a snowman on the shore of the snowy lake, and recalled all the days that Anna had spent begging for them to build snowmen again.

Her parents got up to leave, and her mother kissed her fondly on both cheeks as she headed for the door. "I hope you've had a wonderful birthday, Elsa," she sighed sincerely. "I know that you told the cook not to prepare anything special, but I had a word with him today and he's going to put together your favourite dish for seven o'clock – dinner will be a little early, as you'll no doubt want to have a good read of all those new books this evening."

Elsa laughed, and gave her parents a final hug. While she was glad about the extra time with her parents and being in surroundings that were slightly unfamiliar rather than shut up in her room all day, her mind was focused solely on her plan, and she was eager to leave. "I'll see you tomorrow," she said in farewell before shutting the throne room door behind her.

Her days of roaming the castle freely with her little sister were trapped in the past now, but her feet still seemed to remember their way around the many corridors and chambers. She went down two flights of candlelit stairs, carefully listening for sounds of others to ensure that she would not be seen, until she was in the dim servants' quarters. The corridor was cold and stained near the ceiling with damp, but she continued along it until she reached the slightly worn brass door of the servants' common room.

A vague memory bubbled into her mind, and she recalled a long summer day when she had led Anna down here and waited for the servants to come out, just so that they could question them intensely and ask where they were going. She distinctly remembered that they had been so fascinated by the cook that they had hidden behind the bins in the kitchen for hours, just watching as servants rushed in and out with various meals – they had been caught, of course, and were forbidden from distracting the servants again, but Elsa clung lovingly to the memory now as it was one of the few she had with Anna.

Taking a deep breath and hugging her new cloak tighter to her chest, she pressed her ear to the door and listened for a sound. After a few moments, she concluded that the room was silent, and so hoped that there was nobody inside as she pushed the door open and peered in.

The room was lit by a few candles but the dark russet wallpaper made the underground chamber seem dingy, and it impeded her ability to inspect the area and check for witnesses. Her plan had been quite specific up to this point, but now she had reached a slight pause in her determination: she had thought about entering the room, but not about what to do if it was empty. She had assumed that she would ask a nearby servant to fetch Dalli for her, and pretend she wanted to question him about an item she suspected was stolen by him or something like that, but if the room was empty, she was faced with the terrifying prospect of going further into the quarters.

Her eyes were immediately drawn to the sound of a yawn coming from the far corner, and a flicker of movement in one of the shadowy armchairs. She recognised her father's butler as he tipped his head back against the headrest of the armchair and shut his eyes once more, clearly waiting for the servants' bell to ring and his duties to continue. Her plans were rescued, and she quickly dipped into the room, shutting the door quietly as she entered.

The butler's name escaped her memory, and so she just cleared her throat loudly enough for his head to perk up suddenly. He caught her eye, and looked extremely puzzled for a few moments as he inspected her thoroughly – he had only seen her once or twice since Anna's accident ten years ago, and even then it was only in brief glimpses. When she moved a little closer in the dim lighting, he was sure that it was the princess, and he scrambled to his feet with a hurried smile.

"Your Highness!" he exclaimed in a squeal of surprise. "I must apologise for my laziness – if I had known it was you, I would never have been so . . . so insolent . . ."

She smiled forgivingly. "Don't worry. I'm not here to inspect the servants' quarters – although now I think about it, these lights could do with replacing."

"Of course, Your Highness!" he proclaimed, gesturing wildly to the lighting. "I shall have it seen to as soon as possible."

"No, no, I'm in no hurry to have anything fixed." She was tempted to hold out a hand and pat the butler on the shoulder to calm his nerves, but her hands were shaking and she feared that the whirlwind of emotions unfolding in her head might cause his jacket to freeze at her touch. "I just wondered if you might be able to fetch somebody for me. It's quite important."

He nodded enthusiastically, and moved towards the desk that stood in the corner which was piled high with various address books and notepads. "If you give me a name, I shall go out and find them myself – of course, your father would not normally allow anybody from outside the village into the castle, but as you . . ." He seemed to pause in search of subtle words for an awkward expression. "As you haven't been here in so long, I could make an exception."

"The person I'm looking for is actually a servant," she added hastily. "It's a servant for the Groveston royal family. I just wanted to know if you could bring him here to speak with me for a moment."

He dropped the pen that he had grabbed and shot her a sheepish smile. "Ah, of course," he muttered in as smooth a tone as he could assume. "Which servant would that be?"

"His name is . . . Dalli, I believe." She intentionally added the moment of hesitation in the hope of concealing her eagerness – she was still mentally intending to follow her excuse of seeking Dalli to question him about a missing item of hers. "I'd just like to speak to him for a few moments."

The butler murmured a few words but they were lost in echoes as he opened a second brass door that stood at the back of the room, leading into the living space of the servants. He disappeared down the dark corridor for a few minutes, and Elsa spent the time alone to carefully examine the somewhat grimy and bare walls of the common room.

She heard two pairs of shoes coming back down the corridor towards the her, and she quickly straightened her dress and clutched her cloak tighter. Her face was carefully controlled and showed little emotion as Dalli followed the butler in, but inside, her heart was thumping with anticipation. "Thank you," she said to the butler whose name she still couldn't recall. He nodded silently, and took the words as his cue to leave, shutting the brass door behind him as he headed back towards the living space.

Then it was just Elsa and Dalli alone in the dark common room, silent and avoiding each other's eyes. Eventually, she met his gaze, and licked her lips anxiously as she tried desperately to remember her well-planned speech. It appeared to have drifted from her mind while she had been waiting for him to arrive, and the panic made a small vine of ice begin to creep up the wall behind him.

"Have you changed your mind?" he asked abruptly. He wasn't wearing his cloak, and so the cold of the ice made him shiver in his thin clothing, but he refused to acknowledge it.

She swallowed hard. "Not quite," she began slowly. Seeing his face drop, she quickly continued: "I haven't changed my mind on everything, Dalli. We still don't know each other very well."

His mouth opened as if he was ready to retort, but he forced himself to shut it so that she could go on.

"However, I've been thinking since the last time we saw each other, and I've decided that we should at least give this idea of yours a try. I'm not promising anything, but I'm ready to take this risk – after all, it might end up helping my future people."

A grin broke out across Dalli's face, and he leaned forward as if to embrace her, but quickly regained control of his instincts and reeled back. Instead, he simply let out a happy laugh. "This is great, Elsa!" he exclaimed, though she gestured frantically for him to lower his voice in case anybody came into the common room and saw her. "When do you want to start practising?"

"You still have a job to do," she reminded him patiently, "and I've still got my duties. However, there must be a time when we're both free."

"I'm free in the mornings on most days," Dalli offered hopefully.

"I have morning lessons," she responded in a sigh. "I'm usually busy up until the evening . . . after dinner, though, I've always got some spare time."

He shook his head with disappointment. "After dinner, I have to help wash up the dishes, which can take hours."

They shared a momentary glance of frustration, before Dalli began to smile slowly as he reached a mental solution.

"I guess the only time when we're both free is when everybody else is asleep," he said quietly. "That way, nobody's going to catch you using your powers, and I won't lose my job for not doing my work."

For a moment, she was doubtful – but the delighted expression on his face soon muted her doubt, and she smiled. "Then I suppose we've reached an agreement," she said. "When do you want to start?"

"Tonight?" he suggested eagerly.

She giggled instinctively. "Alright, then we'll start tonight. I don't think I can risk coming back down here again to meet you, though – we have to keep this quiet. Nobody can know that we're practising with my powers, because they could put both of us in danger."

"I'll come and knock on your door when the coast is clear," he said with a smile. They looked at each other in silent satisfaction, and she began to back away, her plan fulfilled.

"I'll see you tonight," she whispered as she reached for the brass door handle, which started to freeze over with her approaching touch.

"Yes," Dalli replied with a grin. She was almost gone when he held out a hand to stop her. "Elsa?" he called.

She peered back at him in the dank lighting. "Yes?" she responded cautiously.

"I promise that this will help you. It's fate, remember?"

Elsa hesitated with one hand on the freezing door, and Dalli was sure that he could hear her laugh softly. "I remember," she called back. A gentle pull from her delicate fingertips opened up the corridor back to the main castle, and she shot Dalli one last glance as she headed back to her room. He stood and watched the space that she had left for a few moments before turning back towards the living quarters and working hard on concealing his overjoyed smile.


	9. May 6th, 1923

**May 6****th****, 1923**

Rupert and Ama have returned to Arendelle! I write in a joyous mood because I have eagerly anticipated their arrival for the three months that they have been away. Their visit certainly lifted the awful mood that I have been in over the past few days, what with Sophia's situation.

This morning I popped into the nursery just to check up on our dear daughter, but I was quickly ushered out by that blasted nanny. According to her, Sophia is improving but still needs rest – and yet I hardly see how lying on her own all day can help her get better! It is my strong belief that she needs the support of Gwen and I in order to heal properly, but the nanny disagrees. I suppose, somewhat begrudgingly, that she has the most experience in this area, as Sophia is our only child.

I worked my way through a mountain of official paperwork this morning, just passing laws and taking telephone calls from the various state departments. I only had to spend a couple of hours tied up at my desk, but by the afternoon I felt so rotten that I decided to take a ride with Gwen out into the village, providing that she was free.

Luckily, her visit to the local hospital was finished by noon, and so we had a few hours of time before Rupert was due to arrive. I told her about my visit to the nursery as we walked down to the stables, and she once again told me that the nanny knew best about what to do with Sophia. The issue could have caused an argument, but I was eager not to spoil our time together with a petty dispute, and so I simply nodded and didn't bring it up again.

The ride was beautiful, and it always brings a smile to my face when I see the villagers. Days like these remind me of how endlessly blessed we are to rule over this kingdom, and the stress of the past five months was eased as I received their ample gifts and greetings. We rode along the fjord, up past our little hidden cavern in the rock face above the water where we had gone while we were courting – I suggested that we might stop and sit in it for a short while to bring back old memories, but Gwen was anxious to get back in time to greet Rupert and Ama, and so we decided not to.

Lunch was almost ready by the time we got back to the castle, and Gwen was very concerned about the state of her hair as it had been unflatteringly pinned down by her riding helmet. I, perhaps a little lazily, am not so concerned about such things and so I was ready to greet Rupert and Ama as soon as they arrived.

As is their kind custom, they brought with them some beautiful souvenirs from the North Mountains, which I am eager to add to our growing collection tomorrow. Ama had a hand-carved wooden dining set to present to Gwen, and Rupert explained that the ice-pickers of the region created these beautiful ornaments in the low season, when ice was too thin to cut and sell. I was presented with a glorious wooden model of a stag's head, complete with blackened glass eyes and a smooth finish. I can see it from where I am writing now, and I haven't been able to stop admiring it all day.

After the exchange of gifts – Gwen and I gave them a few local delicacies from Arendelle, alongside the wonderful blocks of soft cheese that the farmers can only produce around this time of year, because she vividly recalled how much Rupert enjoyed it during his last visit – we took lunch and spoke of trade. Rupert is a marvellous theoretical thinker, and when I told him of my local agreement with the agricultural industry, his strong support made me even more confident in my decision.

Rupert and Ama truly make the castle seem brighter, more alive, with every visit they pay to us. When I first met Rupert at the Spring Ball, Father was uncertain about our friendship – I was a prince and he was a well-known but poor noble of a distant kingdom, with an unusually strong interest in the ice trade of the North Mountains. We were both mischievous teenagers with a passion for causing trouble, and it still brings a blush to my cheeks when I remember that marvellous ice sculpture that we unscrupulously tipped over at the ball.

I see now that my Father's concerns must have doubled when Rupert chose the beautiful Ama, the penniless daughter of an ice-picker in the mountains, as his bride. Father is undoubtedly an old-fashioned soul, and I doubt he believed that an impoverished noble couple from a little kingdom would be suitable associates for his son and heir to the throne. However, it was Ama's presence that seemed to calm Rupert's temper, as Gwen has managed to calm mine, and even Father was glad to luncheon with both of them today.

After eating, Mother and Father left to visit their friends in the royal family of Harriol, a short carriage ride outside of Arendelle, and Rupert enquired after the whereabouts of little Sophia. Gwen explained how she had been suddenly taken ill about a week ago, and they expressed their concern. I am continually trying not to think too much about it, as just the thought of her in that state breaks my heart. It seems hardly fair that a child of two can contract such a vicious illness, and yet we can continue without a single flicker of ill health.

We retired to the lounge and spoke all evening – it is so easy to talk with them, even about the most delicate of matters. I can't remember the last time I laughed so heartily, and I loved the sight of seeing Gwen so happy. Tonight, we were not royals and nobles but we were just friends, enjoying an evening together and sharing our stories; I only wish that we could live this way more often.

For our evening meal, we had the servants bring in a number of platters to pick from, as none of us felt inclined to leave our comfortable positions around the fire to have a formal dinner. Ama retrieved a few local dishes of the North Mountains from their bags, as they will only stay with us for tonight and until noon tomorrow before they return to their home kingdom. The wintry conditions of the mountains don't make for good crops, and so we enjoyed a variety of meat and fish which were unusual but pleasant – and it brought a certain amount of joy to my heart to see Ama so comfortable amongst the blend of our culture and hers, as when we first met, she seemed not to want the two worlds to combine at all.

The memory of us all together brings me to a moment of reflection, which I rarely allow myself to indulge in but which I feel is necessary tonight. It was neither the food nor the wine that made the evening seem to sparkle (though both were excellent - I must remember to give my compliments to the cook tomorrow). It was merely the company.

It is a tired point, but I must reiterate it: friendship. Friendship has made this whole royal ordeal feel at least a little worthwhile, even in these days of increasing stress, and it continues to brighten my heart as I write this. I feel I have been recklessly undervaluing friendship in my 21 years, and only truly appreciate it tonight. Thank the heavens for tonight.

Alfred.


	10. This Triumph

The gentle chiming of the clock on Elsa's wall to signify the passing of an hour was enough to bring a yawn to her breath. She was drooped over a dining room chair watching the hands twirl round the clock's centre, waiting for Dalli to arrive – four nights into their midnight routine, he had developed a distinctive knock that alerted her to his presence, and she repeated the sound over and over in her mind.

When she heard the knock coming from the corridor, she had to pause for a moment to check that she hadn't just imagined it before walking swiftly to the door. Her new Groveston cloak was already draped over her shoulders in preparation for the cold weather to come – she had spent a large proportion of her free evening trying to spin little balls of ice between her palms and control the sizes to which they grew, as Dalli had advised her to do the night before.

She pulled the door open and couldn't help but grin when she saw Dalli waiting there, holding his own cloak and winter boots. "Good evening, Your Highness," he said in a pompous manner to parody her usual regal visitors; she quickly knocked the mockery out of him with a playful smack to his arm, which he received by squealing in fake pain.

"Just get in here," she whispered with a smile – the corridors were always deserted at this late hour, but she was a cautious soul. Dalli walked into her room without hesitation and placed his things down on the dining room table, having grown accustomed to the surroundings. "You act like this place is your home," she laughed gently, shutting the door.

He shot her a smug grin as he sat down and threw his feet up on the dining room table. "Well, I ought to get some benefits for helping you out like this."

Elsa rolled her eyes and pointed with an elegant finger to his feet. She raised her eyebrows once, and he removed them from the table immediately, but retained the childish beam. "Here are your benefits," she said with a smirk as she walked over to the bed and picked up a small velvet bag that was resting on the duvet. She tossed it over to where he was sitting, and he leapt forward to catch it.

"Oh, Elsa, you shouldn't have!" he exclaimed melodramatically before opening the package.

"It's not much," she muttered, "but I suppose I felt you needed some kind of reward for your efforts." She perched on the edge of her bed and watched as he gently pulled the drawstrings of the bag, peering inside inquisitively. The momentary silence allowed her a second of reflection – or rather amazement, as it seemed so surreal that she could welcome somebody else so easily into her room. Perhaps all her years of loneliness had made her welcoming to guests, as she was grateful to have anybody to speak to – or perhaps it was the silly, disarming manner that he employed in their nightly practise sessions. She wasn't quite sure, and she didn't have much time to ponder it as he was soon dipping his fingers into the bag and drawing out her gift.

"Elsa," he gasped as he pulled out the little gold shape. It was a little foil-wrapped chocolate rabbit, small enough to fit into the palm of his hand, but still like a block of pure gold to him. "Do you know that servants aren't even allowed to _touch_ these things once they're put on the table? How much is one even worth?"

She wouldn't answer the question but simply gave him a smile – the truth was that it cost more than a servant's weekly wage. It was hand-crafted by the chocolate-makers in the mountains, which she remembered of her father's detailed explanation from when she was a child. There was a whole village of people who used milk from their own cows and cocoa beans from a distant tropical trading spot to make these ornate chocolate creatures, and the royal family of Arendelle had a constant supply.

Dalli inspected each angle of the model animal carefully, feeling the texture of the foil as if it was real gold. "Do you mind if I . . .?" he asked delicately, gesturing at the open flap of the foil. She shook her head and watched in delight as he carefully stripped away the protective layer and sunk his teeth into the chocolate.

The rabbit seemed to be gone within a few seconds as Dalli gulped it down hungrily, emitting a small groan of enjoyment. He hadn't even finished chewing when he turned to her and said, "That is undeniably the best thing that I have ever tasted."

"I'm glad you like it," she laughed softly. "Now, what do you think we should do today?"

"Keep practising," he replied instantly, swirling his tongue around his mouth to get every last bit of chocolate. "Keep trying to do and undo your work. I guess we know that you have no trouble using your powers – it's learning how to stop using them that's creating the issue."

Elsa sighed and walked over to the dining table to join him. Already, the satisfaction of seeing Dalli enjoying the chocolate rabbit had caused her powers to awaken, and her palms were beginning to feel distinctly chilly. "Do you think I've improved at all since we started?" she asked with a frown.

He gave a short, gentle laugh. "Four days won't be enough to gain complete control over your powers, Elsa." He smiled at her with confidence, so strong and steady in his eyes that it seemed to pour into her and she felt a rush of warmth in her belly. "Control takes time and patience. So come on – let's begin."

Biting her lip in concentration, she moved her hands in parallel and flexed her fingers outwards, building up the small balls of ice between her palms that she had been practising earlier. With an even harder bite, she worked her hands back in towards the centre of the ball in an attempt to make it shrink again, but her efforts were less successful; the ball continued to grow in size, and when it had reached the extent of its growth, it burst into a gentle flurry of white snow.

Dalli simply folded one hand over the other in his lap, and gave a single nod towards her fingers. "Try again."

Elsa took a deep breath and worked her fingers outwards as she exhaled, creating a ball of spinning white ice that danced between her palms. Then, with a small grunt of frustration, she tried to encourage the ball back into itself by moving her hands in the opposite direction. She huffed and slumped back into her chair as the ball once again inflated to the point of snowy explosion.

"It's no use!" she cried out, throwing her hands up in the air and unintentionally sending a burst of snow up towards the ceiling. "I can't control them, Dalli. We should just give up now, and save ourselves the effort – you've only got five more days in Arendelle anyway. I don't see how much difference a week of practise can make. Maybe fate was wrong."

"Fate is never wrong," he said with a calm sigh. "There is a reason for everything where fate is concerned, and this situation is precisely the reason for my being here. If you were sat here on your own trying to do this, you'd fail once and give up, and tell yourself that it was impossible."

She was tempted to burst out with another accusation that he didn't know her well enough to judge, but there was a slight tinge of shame in her stomach because she couldn't deny that they knew each other's natures by now. The likelihood of her giving up if she tried on her own was the truth, but she was too stubborn to admit it, and so she retained her gloomy expression.

He continued. "I am here to tell you that it is possible, Elsa. For you, anything is possible – and I'll be here for as long as you need me to convince you that's the truth."

She looked up at his words, frowning. "You still leave in five days," she said in puzzlement.

"We'll see," he replied with a smile. "For now, let's just keep practising."

* * *

"That's exactly it!" Dalli boomed in excitement as Elsa whirled her hands rapidly round in a clockwise circle, winding the huge storm that she had created back into her palms. "You're doing it, Elsa! Keep going!"

Ecstatic, she moved her hands faster and watched in awe as her powers were reeled back in. "I can't believe this is working!" she shouted over the howling of the storm wind. "This is finally working!"

It was the sixth night of their practising with her powers, and their small-scale victories had developed into this triumph that was unfolding in front of their incredulous eyes. Elsa laughed as she finally drew the huge tundra, which had begun in a simple ball of ice, down to the size of a single penny. With one final, artful flick of her fingers, the ball disappeared into a tiny sputter of snow.

There was a moment of silence between them as they looked at each other in amazement. And then, with a loud howl of victory, they collapsed backwards on to her bed in an uncontrollable spurt of laughter.

"You did it!" Dalli forced out in gasps of breath between giggles. "You got rid of the storm!"

Elsa held her stomach as it ached from laughter – the wild, ceaseless, random laughter that she didn't realise she had missed so much until that moment. "_We_ did it," she corrected breathlessly. "We did it!"

They lay there for as long as their laughing fit continued, and even after it ended, they were comfortable to enough remain lying next to each other. She turned her head to him with a grin and stated in a hoarse whisper, "I can't remember the last time I laughed so much."

"Neither can I," he responded. With a grunt of effort, he pulled himself into a sitting position, which she immediately copied. The laughter seemed to die down in his lungs. "But can you repeat it?"

She took a few deep gulps of air, still recovering from their triumph with the occasional giggle, and frowned at him. "I've done it once," she muttered. "Now that I know how to do it, it can't be that difficult to do it again."

He shot her a wary smile. "You know how to end a storm in front of me in your room," he replied slowly. "When you're out there trying to prove to your parents that your powers are under control, it could be a different story."

Her forehead creased into a frown as she acknowledged his point. "I suppose you're right," she responded with a worried sigh. "But what are we supposed to do to fix that? I can't prove anything to anybody yet – my powers are still pretty raw."

They paused in thought for a couple of seconds, before Dalli quickly turned his head to Elsa with the glint of an idea in his eye.

"What are your parents doing with that big ballroom nowadays?"


	11. May 10th, 1923

**May 10****th****, 1923**

I can barely write for the excited trembling of my hands – I come bearing brilliant news. Gwen told me today that we are expecting another child! My heart is alight with happiness, and I know that Mother and Father are very pleased. When a little more time has passed, we are considering throwing a ball in honour of the pregnancy, as Father threw for us when Gwen was expecting Sophia.

Sophia's situation is the only thing dampening my spirits tonight. As usual, I paid my daily visit to the nursery in order to check up on my darling child, but I was once again denied entry by the nanny. It would be possible to use my authority as King to force my way in, but I suppose that I must follow Gwen's advice and stay away for now.

We were dining at the breakfast table this morning when she told me the good news; apparently she had suspected that she might be pregnant for a few weeks but didn't want to disturb the family doctor unnecessarily. How typical of Gwen, to be more concerned about the doctor's workload than her personal health! We were eating alone as Mother and Father had set off on an early ride around the fjord, and so we sat together in the lounge for a while to discuss how we would tell them.

When they returned at around noon, we were thoroughly prepared. We waited until lunch was served, and though we had decided to wait until the meal was over to break the news, Gwen's excitement was too much to contain and so she told them of the baby halfway through the soup course. Naturally, they were just as ecstatic as we were, and Mother in particular was eager to discuss the new arrival with Gwen.

Father and I left the two women at the lunch table when he asked me to walk with him around the castle rose gardens. This, a rare offer from my rather stoic father, was one that I could not refuse and so we set off immediately.

The roses are absolutely stunning at this time of year – I must take a stroll with Gwen around the gardens, for I know how much she loves the smell of the flowers in bloom. There is something about the red rose that cannot be properly observed unless with a valentine, and the pink of each petal reminded me of the tender days of our courtship, though those days are far behind us now.

We walked for a while in silence, which I have grown to expect from Father; emotion comes perhaps a little easier to me than him because of my genes from Mother, who is much more willing to show her feelings than both of us. Nevertheless, he cleared his throat in time and began to tell me a story that I had heard many times before, but never from his mouth.

It was always Mother who told me this story when I was a boy, and as I think of it now, it was a story that she often told on days when Father was at his most uncooperative. In my childhood, my parents came as one joint package that could never split rather than being two individuals to my young mind, but as an adult, I can now appreciate how difficult it must have been for Mother on the days when Father's rule over the kingdom was strained. So too can I now see how Gwen's emotions may be pressed by my struggles, and I have made a resolution to be more caring towards her, particularly now that she is expecting our second child.

When told by Mother, the story always began on the moment that she lay eyes on her future husband, but Father chose to use an earlier point for his introduction. He stated that he, the eldest son of five, was always expected to be an example to his four younger brothers and make the right moral decisions. He felt pressured to make no mistakes, and yet if his siblings ever made an error, they were easily forgiven.

He met Mother at a garden party in winter, which was being held at the beautiful palace of the Harriol royal family. He, two of his siblings and his mother were in attendance, and their carriage had arrived early, meaning that they were some of the first at the party. Bored by the rather stilted conversations he found in the main ballroom, he had ventured out into the garden, where the servants were still preparing for the arrival of further guests.

There was only one other person in the garden, standing under the rose arbour which was lit with what seemed like a thousand white candles; she was a beautiful young woman in an icy blue evening gown, seventeen years old and the youngest daughter of a Harriol noble, and she turned around to meet his eyes.

When Mother had told this story to me, she said that it was at this moment that she realised who she would marry. Father was a little less elaborate – the specific details I have written here are mostly inferred from his limited description – but the tone of his voice alone suggested that he felt the same way.

Though they had other obligations at the party and were refused the opportunity to spend all evening together, they returned to each other's arms to dance as often as duty would allow, which did not go unnoticed by their respective parents. Father told me that in the carriage ride back to Arendelle that night, his mother refused to say a single word to him, for she was so ashamed by his besotted behaviour.

Father didn't need to tell me why his mother was mortified – Mother had told me this story so many times that I knew it off-by-heart anyway. He was betrothed to a princess from Groveston, who he had never met and yet whose hand he was to take in marriage on his eighteenth birthday. When he returned, both of his parents shunned him until he was forced to rip up the address that the beautiful noble's daughter had given him to write to.

But all was not lost. Fearing this reaction from his parents, Father waited for a few days in order to fool them into believing he had given up on the idea of courting her. Just before dawn on a frosty morning, he took his horse from the stables and rode all the way from Arendelle to Harriol, where he went back to the palace of the royals and asked for the address of Mother's family. From there, he rode to their estate, and would not leave until her parents agreed to let him speak to her.

This was where Father stopped, and told me in a very serious voice that it was not a fairytale love story as Mother had so often told me in my youth. Their parents intervened wherever possible to stop them from seeing each other, and his mother even forbade their marriage until he was twenty-one. We spent a long hour wandering around the gardens and talking about the practical kind of love that was required of all royals, rather than the issueless love that was portrayed in the children's stories that Mother used to read to me, and which I now read to Sophia.

I think I know now why Father wanted to speak with me in this way. While my parents were always supportive of my relationship with Gwen, I believe that Father was trying to say that royal love will always face difficulties, perhaps more so than the love shared by other people. Love, when felt by an heir or a monarch, can be both a duty and a chore, as it is important to include not just emotion but politics in our actions.

My love for Gwen is strong, but Father is correct, and I trust his years of monarchy before retirement to be an indication of his wisdom. We will face further troubles, I am sure, particularly with Sophia's illness continuing and another baby on the way. However, Father's message seemed to be one not just of warning, but one of hope, as he and Mother still live happily together today and their relationship was not brought to rubble by the doubts of their superiors; love can survive through any hardship. Perhaps it just takes a little bit of effort.

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**Author's Note:** Hi guys! I hope you enjoyed this chapter – it was really fun to write (maybe I'm a hopeless romantic at heart, eh? :P) Anyway, I just wanted to pop in here and say a huuuge thank you for all the reviews, follows and favourites that you've given to this story. They are always so lovely and encouraging, and I realised that I hadn't thanked you guys before for this, but I want you to know that I appreciate every one. Okay – keep reading, and thanks! :)


	12. Out Of Her Hands

The door to the castle's grand ballroom had been closed for so long that its hinges creaked with rust when Elsa pushed it. She shot a wary glance down the shadowy corridors to her left and right, but as expected, there was nobody in sight – everybody else was asleep. She might have been tempted by the idea of sleep herself, if she wasn't so excited about the night to come.

She poked her head tentatively through the small gap she had opened, before pushing the door a little further and allowing Dalli to follow her in. He too surveyed his surroundings before entering, and she heard him groan quietly as she walked further into the ballroom she once knew so well.

"It's too dark to see anything in here!" he whispered in disappointment. "Maybe this wasn't such a good idea – we won't be able to practise in the dark."

Elsa couldn't help but laugh gently at his puzzled expression, before walking calmly towards the light switch on the wall. She pushed the door shut, was still for a moment to check for any noise in the corridor, before flicking the stiff toggle.

For a few seconds, it felt as if her breath had been stolen from her body by the sight of the lit-up ballroom. She could feel her throat swelling with the threat of tears as the memories of this room flooded back into her mind, and she tried to disguise this emotion with coughing. Dalli noticed her reaction, but knew when to withhold his teasing, and so stayed silent a few paces away.

The ballroom was a vision of blue and gold, with a huge ceiling painted to represent the marriage of air and water that resulted in the famous North Mountains ice. Tiny pearls outlined the crest of each oily wave, and each gold column that lined the ballroom walls was engraved with little depictions of fjord waves. The floor, designed to support the feet of a thousand dancing lovers, was an amber patchwork of wood from all different areas of Arendelle. If Elsa looked closely at a particular part of the floor, she could have sworn that she saw a little scorch mark from Anna's accident all those years ago, but she told herself that she was just imagining it and looked up to Dalli.

They gazed at each other in silence, as if they were both waiting for the other to suggest an idea. "We've got this far," Elsa muttered eventually, holding her hands together anxiously – this was now much more than just a midnight meeting in her room. "Now what should we do?"

"We have to practise," Dalli resolved slowly. "That's what we came here to do, isn't it? We came here to practise controlling your powers on a large scale. And, well . . . this is about as large a scale as Arendelle could offer you."

"And what happens after tonight?" she snapped in response. She didn't mean to be harsh, but the memories from the ballroom and the sheer illegality of their presence there were making her nervous. "Do we just wait for fate to step in again?"

He frowned at her sudden change in mood, and walked a few paces closer to her. Neither of them had dared to venture into the centre of the ballroom yet – it felt too much like a stage, and the last event involving Elsa's powers that had taken place here was an unforgettable tragedy. "Visions will not always be around to guide us, Elsa, but I know that this is right. I know that fate brought us together to do this."

"You always say that!" she exclaimed in a voice louder than she had intended.

Dalli gestured with a hand that she should keep her voice down, as he was still an intruder in this part of the castle and she was still at risk of being caught by her parents. "I trusted the vision that told me to go to you, and you got out of your room for the first time in ten years. I trusted my instincts and asked to help you control your powers, and you said yourself last night that you've never had so much control over them before. Now, I'm asking you to trust me, and practise for a little longer. Good things will come – I can feel it."

She frowned doubtfully. "We sneak out at night and we have fun, Dalli, but now that we're in here . . . it feels too real. It feels like this isn't just a game anymore."

"It was never a game to me, Elsa." He took a deep breath, and moved backwards slowly, until he was stood in the middle of the room. The memories of Anna, flying from snow pile to snow pile in the dead of night, rushed back to her head and made her feel dizzy. "I came here to help you, and that's what I intend to do. Let's practise."

"You're sure that practising here will help me?" she asked in a trembling voice, hands lingering over her stomach as she gently flexed her fingers in preparation.

He smiled. "I'm sure. If you can control them here, you can control them in front of the kingdom."

After a further moment of hesitation she nodded, and began to spin her arms round in a clockwise motion, just as they had rehearsed in the nights before. This, she realised, was their eighth night of secret meetings – the strange mix of emotion that poured through her at that thought seemed to spread into her fingertips, as the storm she was building doubled in size. She was tempted to draw it in now, when it was still spinning between her palms and manageable in size, but a glance from Dalli told her to keep building it up.

As the ice ball grew beyond her hands, a light sprinkle of snow began to fall over them. "Focus on what you want your powers to do," he added in a quiet voice. She bit her lip as she concentrated on making the storm swell. The snowfall worsened, and the flakes became visible as they twirled around her hands, a layer beginning to build up on the ballroom floor.

This was as large as Elsa had ever willed a storm to grow, but she continued to whirl the tundra around in the air until it had almost filled the whole room. The snowfall was so heavy that it had buried their feet and though she saw Dalli shiver in the corner of her eye, she was so concentrated on maintaining the development of the storm that she didn't give it a second thought.

At last, it reached the size she had intended; the wind howled softly as the layer of snow around their feet built. The snowflakes were now so large that she could barely see Dalli through the whiteout, and she had to shout to be heard by him. "What next?" she asked, continuing to move her hands in parallel to maintain the tundra.

"Wind it back in!" he commanded through chattering teeth.

Elsa began tentatively to move her hands in the other direction. She had practised this difficult motion before and had earned her success after many attempts, but this storm was worryingly larger than any she had ever created, and her fingers were trembling with anxiety. The movement of her hands was not working.

"It's not working!" she yelled out to Dalli over the howling of the storm. She cast a frantic glance towards the shut doors behind her, fearful that the sound of the raging tempest might awaken others. "Dalli, what should I do?"

He saw her panic and waved his hands in circular motions, as if he might suddenly inherit her powers and be able to save the situation for her. They had never seen a storm spin out of control on this scale – before, the relatively small balls of ice she had made simply burst into a flurry of snow. This was no longer just a small ball of ice.

She imitated his actions, but still, the storm raged on. If anything, the snowfall was heavier with the swirling of her hands, and the layer of snow on the floor was now approaching her knees. She could see Dalli shaking with the cold as he desperately tried to shout suggestions at her.

_It's going to happen again._ The terrifying thought struck her suddenly as she caught Dalli's eyes, and saw the fear rising behind his brave persona. _My powers are going to hurt someone again._ It was enough to draw an alarmed cry from her lips as she watched the huge tundra fill the room. The situation was out of her hands now – there was nothing she could do but watch as her powers brought the world around her to splinters and ashes.

"No!" she exclaimed as the words filled her head. The shout was too weak to be heard over the howling of the storm, and so she repeated it a little louder. "No! It's not out of my hands! It's not!" Once again, her words were lost to the storm. She repeated them in a long howl of her own, raising her hands above her head in wild desperation. "It's not!"

For a second, the room was absolutely silent.

The wind died down around her. The snow began to thin, each flake melting in the air as it floated on the remainder of the breeze towards the ballroom floor. The ball of ice, with a little encouragement from the waving of her fingertips, shrunk back into itself until it was a silent bubble pathetically bobbing on the wind in front of her. Almost as suddenly as it had spun out of control, the tempest had died, and they were left in shock under the quiet snowfall.

Elsa took a moment to inspect the ballroom, which seemed to have evaded damage. Her eyes marvelled at the sight of every pristine column and the flawless painted ceiling – was it possible that there would be no consequences from the near-catastrophe that had just played out before them?

The thoughts were snatched from her mind as she glanced over to Dalli, expecting him to share in her incredulous joy. At first glance, he seemed to be standing still, just looking at her in silence; when she took a few paces towards him, she realised that he was trembling quite violently.

"Dalli!" she cried as she rushed through the blanket of snow to him. He was wearing winter clothes in preparation for the storm, but they were little use against a blizzard of that size, and he was unresponsive when she wrapped her arms around him. She rubbed her palms swiftly against the flat of his back in the hope of spreading some warmth into his bones. "Dalli, I'm so sorry."

With a few minutes of this, the trembling began to ease. His arms began to stretch again as his body recovered from the extreme cold – for a moment, Elsa feared that she might have to find the family doctor at this hour of the night to treat him, but he seemed to be only shaken by the ordeal. "Elsa," he whispered in a hoarse voice, still too weak to speak properly.

"I should have been more careful," she muttered as she clung to him, still rubbing his back. "I should never have let the storm get to that size."

Slowly, she felt Dalli's arms wrap themselves around her back. He leaned his head back from the embrace to look at her worried gaze. "The cold never bothered me," he managed to utter. She couldn't contain the relieved giggles that came from her mouth as she watched his face stretch into a faint smile.

She opened her mouth to respond, but Dalli had already leaned his head forwards abruptly so that his lips met hers. They stood there for a few moments, surrounded by the falling snow, locked in what felt like a timeless embrace.

From the doors of the ballroom, Anna held a hand over her mouth to hold in a gasp. She had risen from her bed at the sound of a rushing storm, which awoke a distant memory within her that she felt compelled to investigate. When she reached the ballroom, the storm had just ended, but she had peered in just in time to catch the servant whose frozen body was wrapped up in the arms of the sister she barely knew.

It was not this that brought the gasp to her lips though. No, the thing that had captured Anna's attention was the storm that Elsa had somehow tamed and brought to an end, right in the middle of the castle ballroom. How could that be possible – and why did it feel so familiar?


	13. May 13th, 1923

**May 13****th****, 1923**

Today is a day that I would rather not relive through writing, but I suppose that I must if I ever wish to recover from it. It began in the usual way – breakfast with Gwen and my parents, as darling Sophia is still resting with this dreaded illness – and I had planned a day of business meetings. However, those plans were pleasantly interrupted by a telephone call from Rupert and Ama at around noon, who informed me that they would be riding back to Arendelle shortly to celebrate the good news of Gwen's pregnancy with us.

I was obviously elated at the prospect of their return, and so I politely informed the President of the Arendelle Farmers' Union, who was waiting outside my office at the time, that we would have to reschedule our meeting for next week. He was very genial about the matter, though I must admit that I withheld the true reason for the postponement for the sake of brevity, and he even congratulated Gwen on his way out. That left me a few hours of free time in which to luncheon with Gwen and our soon-arriving guests, and so I quickly informed her of Rupert and Ama's coming, just so that she could reschedule any of her own meetings to accommodate them.

Rupert's carriage pulled up within the hour, and it was so refreshing to see him and Ama once more, despite having seen them so soon ago. They also brought some charming things for Gwen – just a hamper of food gifts from their home kingdom, like cheese and some preserved meats, as they figured that she would be more prone to snacking now that she's pregnant. Gwen was very grateful and Ama was eager to discuss the influence of food choice upon pregnancy, as I believe that she and Rupert intend to start their own family in the near future. My heart leaps at the thought of little Sophia having a playmate, but this also brings me great sadness, as the darling girl still hasn't recovered from her dreadful illness.

According to the nanny, she is gradually getting better, although she still needs time – I finally accosted her about Sophia in the corridor today, and she was still evasive but I was at least allowed to see my child. She is in a poor state indeed, and the nanny informed me that her bed is often drenched with sweat in the morning due to her high temperature. I do hope that she will sweat the illness out in the end – it simply isn't fair for her to be cooped up all day like this, without her family around her.

Perhaps my focus on family instead of duty was misplaced, as Father suggested today. Rupert and Ama could only stay for a couple of hours but as usual the time was spent well, with lots of laughter and stories being told. They left just before the evening meal was served, but have promised to visit again soon so that we can spend longer together. We waved them off at the castle gates, and as all official appointments had been cancelled for both of us to accommodate the surprise visit, Gwen and I spent the reminder of our time before dinner taking a pleasant walk through the rose gardens.

Mother and Father were eerily silent at the table, and as we tried to describe Rupert and Ama's visit to them, they just shot each other quiet glances at every word. I was concerned for a moment that they disapproved of our guests, as Father had in the past, but they did not bring up these suggested feelings during the meal and so we ate in awkward silence. When it was over, Mother quickly suggested that she and Gwen visit the servants' quarters to revise the menu for next week, which left Father and I alone together.

My father has never been known for his emotional attributes, and that can seem like something of an insult to him at times, but this slight impediment certainly gives him the advantage of direct speech. As shown by tonight's events, Father does not mix up his words with his emotions when the time for strength arises, which is perhaps why he is fondly remembered by the people of Arendelle as a firm but wise king. I have often wanted to follow in his steel footsteps, but tonight, that want has been quelled somewhat.

He began by asking me if I had enjoyed today's visit from Rupert and Ama, to which I responded that I did. He then asked more scathingly if the neglect of my royal duties was worth it, seeing as the day's official engagements had to be postponed so as to receive our guests. I, a little offended by this callous suggestion that I was not properly fulfilling my role as king, replied that one day of rest will not make a lot of difference to what will hopefully be a long reign.

Father disagreed, and swiftly suggested that we retired to the lounge to discuss it more comfortably – though the cynic in me suggests that he did it to avoid the prying ears of the servants, who were coming into the dining room to clear away the plates. We spent a long evening going through the stilted, polite motions of an argument in the royal family; I was so concerned with the underlying politics of each sentence that I rarely said what I meant, as Father is a retired monarch and still has some influence over the running of the kingdom. He, being exempt from the accountability of the people and therefore able to say whatever he liked to me, was far less reserved, though he maintained his manners.

His central point was this: it was irresponsible and neglectful to leave my duties for Rupert and Ama today. I might have agreed with him on that, had it been a frequent occurrence – but shouldn't even a king be allowed some spare time? If I am not afforded the luxuries of the common man, then how can I claim to be his equal? My father was not concerned with such questions, and instead focused on wringing an apology out of me.

After I had reluctantly given him that, he seemed more satisfied, and gave me some gathered wisdom from his time as king. He told me that friendships in a place of high status, such as the royal court, will burn and fade quickly like shooting stars (once again, I am elaborating on my father's account, as his language is rather more straightforward than my writing would suggest). However, duties remain with you throughout your reign, and you must put them before personal relationships.

The argument had blown over for the most part, and so I felt comfortable to ask him if he had ever neglected his personal life for the sake of the throne and regretted it. I never thought of Father as a man with regrets, but I suppose that as everybody must suffer a certain amount of guilt, so must he – he showed that tonight as he told me the story of his childhood friend, Agnetha.

I had never heard this story before – perhaps because Father never had the heart to tell it – but now that it has opened my eyes to my father's personal struggles with the throne, I find that I cannot close them. He told me of a poor girl called Agnetha who he used to play with in the village as a child. They were almost inseparable, according to Father, though of course he had his royal duties to attend to as well as playing with her – but as their friendship grew closer, his duties seemed like a chore to him, and he couldn't wait to get outside and meet with her again.

Now, as Father grew up and had to take on more responsibilities in his preparation to be king, he could see less and less of Agnetha. Eventually they grew apart as childhood friends often do, and he didn't see her for many years as he fulfilled the role of prince. However, they met again on the day after Father's wedding to Mother, and this was where he seemed to tell the story with the most remorse.

Agnetha grew up in poverty and as Father put it, she was never given any advantages in life. As she grew up in the shadow of the royal castle, gradually losing contact with the prince who she felt chose his entitlement over her, she became hardened and bitter. She joined a group of rebels – the Scarlet Parade, which I recall reading about as a child, unable to imagine such a movement rising in our rather peaceful kingdom – who intended to kill Father's parents in an assassination attempt. The day they chose was his wedding to Mother.

I couldn't hide my shock at this moment of the story, and judging by my father's expression, I felt that he found it hard to conceal his own shock when he discovered the plot back then too. He told me that he only found out about all of these small details after the event had occurred - the day after the wedding, his guards only told him there were three rebels in the cells of the local jail who had tried to assassinate the King and Queen.

Father was reunited with Agnetha through prison bars, and his guards faced him with a decision that I would hate to encounter today: as law stated, treason or attempted treason was to result in the immediate execution of the criminal. This punishment rarely ever applied in docile Arendelle but it was quite clearly necessary in the case of this law, and an official pardon to his childhood friend would ruin the reputation of the royal family and remove some of the legitimacy of their ruling.

I was a little tentative when I asked him what decision he made, but Father was abrupt as always – perhaps to disguise a deeper hurt that was easier to hide than to heal, as I theorised at the time – in telling me that he had to allow the law to take effect. Even more heartbreakingly, he had to watch on the day that Agnetha was taken to the gallows with her two accomplices from the Scarlet Parade.

My father didn't say that he had regret. That would be a betrayal of his duties, which were so deeply engrained into his mind that even in a quiet conversation with his only son, he could not forsake them. However, I could see that the memory of Agnetha still haunted him somehow, and as I recall the image of his face illuminated by the lit fireplace in the lounge tonight, I would guess that some of the deep wrinkles across his brow are the result of similarly tough situations.

The conversation seemed to be over when he told me curtly that as king, he removed the death penalty from Arendelle, even for treason. Father was very certain that he removed it as the people disagreed with its intentions, but I quietly believe that Agnetha had something to do with the law change. Though he could not save her life, he could use her memory and his power to protect the lives of others.

Perhaps that is the lesson that he wanted to teach me tonight. In times of heartbreak, need or celebration, the king's people must come before his own affairs. This is a harsh lesson to learn, but I realise its importance in our lives as royals. A monarch has a responsibility to his people that should not be undermined by personal feelings. To him, service to the kingdom must come above petty wants, and duty must come above all.

Alfred.

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**Author's Note: **Hello! Once again, I wanted to thank you guys for all your brilliant reviews, follows and favourites for this story. They're so lovely to read, and it's such a warm feeling to think that people are enjoying the story. In response to your question, Elphie Forever, Dalli is intended to be around the same age as Elsa - eighteen or nineteen years old, although Elsa doesn't really know herself. He's not massively older or younger than her, anyway. :) Alright, I'll see you guys later!


	14. Very Different Worlds

An autumnal chill was rolling in from the fjord, but Elsa didn't mind the cold. She was sat against the wall of the cavern, watching the sun slowly sink below the horizon over the waves. As he sat beside her, Dalli rested one hand tentatively over hers – and though it was an unfamiliar feeling, she let it remain there with a small smile on her face.

"Elsa," he muttered quietly. They hadn't spoken for a long time and had chosen to sit together in contented silence, but there were certain issues they could no longer avoid. "Elsa, you know that I leave tomorrow."

The words seemed too painful to face on such a beautiful day, and so she refused to respond. There was a childish part of her mind that told her the problem would disappear if she ignored it.

He sighed, and laid his head back against the cavern wall. "We have to figure out some kind of plan – we can't just sit here forever."

"What kind of plan could possibly work, Dalli?" she asked in a curt tone without looking at him. Elsa feared that if she looked at him, her eyes might blur over with tears, and the entry she had read that morning from Alfred's diary about royal duties still lingered in her mind. Making silly plans would only distract her from her dedication to the kingdom. "You have to leave tomorrow, so this is our last day. That's all there is to figure out." This alone brought a lump to her throat, but she quickly choked it down.

Dalli let his head rest gently against the top of hers. "I don't have to leave," he began softly. "I could always hand in my notice and not board the ship to go back home – there are plenty of servants in Groveston already. I could probably even get a job in the castle here."

"No." Her tone was firm and final. "Your friends and family are back in Groveston, and you should go back to them. Everybody you love is there."

"Not everybody," he replied instinctively.

Silence descended over them again, and Elsa tried to pretend that she couldn't feel the warmth of his hand and head against her. After a short while, she cleared her throat again. "We could write letters to each other, but that's all."

"I won't be able to help you practise through a letter, Elsa," Dalli muttered sadly. "It won't be the same."

She clenched her eyes shut and tried to focus on the sound of the lapping waves below them. "It doesn't matter," she lied. "I've learned enough now to carry on practising independently – but I can keep you updated on my progress, if you'd like."

"You mean that you don't need me anymore?" His tone sounded hurt.

_Of course I need you. _That was her immediate mental response, but she forced herself to think more responsibly, as any good princess should. _Duty must come above all._ "I don't mean that. What I mean is that we've come so far together that now, I think I can continue on my own."

She felt Dalli shaking his head. "We've come so far that it would be a waste to give up now. We can get through this, Elsa – all you need to do is agree that I should stay, and we can train your powers more. You could see your sister again!"

Elsa let out a deep breath and opened her eyes to the sunset. "I don't agree." _Another lie. _"What would happen after my powers were under control? What would you do then?"

"I would stay in Arendelle."

"Why?"

"For you."

"We couldn't be together," she asserted in as firm a voice as she could muster. "My parents would never allow it – I am expected to carry on the royal bloodline with another noble."

"Come on, Elsa!" Dalli exclaimed in a furious outburst, throwing up the hand that wasn't resting over hers. "Your family might believe in that kind of lifestyle, but I know that you don't."

"What I do or do not believe in is not important!" she replied, spinning her head to meet his gaze abruptly. "I am a princess of Arendelle, and you are a servant, Dalli! Tomorrow, when you have to leave for Groveston, I am going to go on being a princess, and you are going to go on being a servant. We live in two very different worlds!"

He leapt up to his feet in a sudden movement, slamming his fist against the cavern wall in frustration. "You don't have to live this way, always hiding and pretending that you're some kind of monster! You shouldn't have to be kept away from your sister!"

The walls of the cavern began to frost over as Elsa's temper flared. "I keep myself away from my sister to protect her!" she screeched, rising to her feet to face him, though his lanky build lent itself to height and he towered over her.

"Protect me from what?"

Elsa and Dalli both whipped their heads around to see Anna standing uncertainly at the cavern opening. It was her voice that had disrupted the argument, and the shock sent another vine of frost shooting up the wall to Elsa's dismay.

There were a few moments of stunned silence before Dalli began to quickly back away from Elsa and head out on to the narrow path that led back to the mainland. "I'm going back to the castle," he muttered as an excuse to leave, sidling around Anna. He cast one last meaningful glance at Elsa from the cavern entrance. "If you want to see me again, come and find me. We still have things to discuss."

With that, he left the two sisters standing opposite each other in the rocky room, which was gradually growing colder with each passing second. Anna's hands squirmed at her sides as she looked around anxiously, continually casting unsure glances back at Elsa. "What's going on?" she asked in a voice that barely stretched above a whisper.

Elsa found that her own voice had virtually disappeared, and could only stand and stare at the sister she hadn't seen in so many years. The girl was no longer a child – at fifteen years old, Anna was a young woman, and though that was to be expected, Elsa couldn't help but feel a rush of pride.

Snowflakes began to drift down around them as her powers swelled with emotion, and Anna flinched away from them as if they might burn her skin at touch. "I saw you last night," she pushed out through her confusion. "You were with that boy, and there was a storm, and you . . . why did you choose him over me, Elsa?"

The older sister's brow furrowed, and she shook her head slowly. "I wouldn't choose anybody over you. You're my sister."

"And we haven't spoken in years!" Anna responded in a wail. "Every time I knocked on your door, you turned me away. Every time I wanted us to be friends again, like we were when we were little, you told me that it was impossible – you disappeared! No one was allowed to see you! Not even me." Her eyes flickered with hurt.

Elsa opened her mouth to defend herself, but Anna was already continuing in a hurried burble.

"So I spent all that time thinking you were just focusing on your studies, and I felt guilty for wanting to distract you, until I saw you last night with that boy! You chose to wander off with a stranger instead of your own sister, who has been waiting for you to just open your door and speak to her for years!"

"I did it to keep you safe, Anna!" her sister responded, trying desperately to keep the tears welling up in her eyes from spilling. "I did it because it's my duty."

Anna shook her head in sorrow. "I just don't understand. How is coming out here with some stranger your duty?"

"I was trying to train my powers," Elsa explained hurriedly as the snow falling around them thickened. Despite the practise she had in trying to control her powers, they still seemed to go rogue in a state of heightened emotion. She looked down at her glove-covered hands with a sigh. "What's happening now and what happened in the ballroom occur because of my powers. I wish I could explain everything, Anna, but I've been trying to protect you from it by staying away from you – you were hurt before because I couldn't control them."

"No, I wasn't," her sister responded with a blank expression. "You were just afraid that you would hurt me. It's never really happened, so you don't have to be afraid anymore!" Her tone softened as a tear rolled down her cheek. "I don't have to be alone anymore."

Elsa took a deep breath in the hope of controlling the tears in her eyes, which were threatening to overflow. "You were hurt," she repeated more slowly. "You were hurt, but when we took you to be healed, you lost your memory of it all. You were never supposed to know that I was like this, so I had to stay away from you – I still have to stay away from you."

Anna shook her head. "No!" she exclaimed loudly, sniffing as if about to sob. "I've only just got you back."

"It's my duty to keep you safe!"

"Who cares about duties?" Anna wailed. "We're family! Family should come above duty, Elsa!"

Her older sister used one gloved finger to quickly swipe a tear from underneath her eye, hoping that Anna wouldn't see it. "Duty comes above all," she repeated in a low tone, gaze pinned firmly to the ground in case she caught a glance of her sister's bewildered expression and burst into tears. "This should never have happened. I should never have left my room – it would have been better if you'd never known about this, or about the powers."

"And now I can't forget," Anna murmured solemnly with tears rolling down her blushed cheeks.

Elsa looked up to meet her eyes once, but they both looked away after a single moment, both too overwhelmed by the meeting to keep the other's gaze. "You should go back to the castle," she said in as calm a voice as she could.

Anna looked up, rubbing her eyes clumsily with the palm of her hand. "What will you do?" The sun had now set and a cool blue twilight had set upon them, turning the layer of snow around their feet to a chilly grey colour.

"I'll go back too, but later – Father can't know that we were together." Elsa took a moment to collect herself, before reaching out a shaky hand towards her sister. "I'm going to put this right," she resolved in a determined tone.

There was a moment of quiet between them, when all that could be heard were the hushed sniffles of two sisters holding back tears. Eventually, Anna reached out her own gloveless hand and grasped Elsa's firmly. "Are you going to disappear again when I go?" she asked with genuine fear trembling in her voice.

Elsa smiled half-heartedly. "I'll try not to," she whispered in the darkness. They stood there for a few seconds, hands shivering together as they shook with restrained tears, before Anna reluctantly withdrew her hand and went out into the night.

Alone in the empty cavern, Elsa took one final look at the fjord, its waves now black and glinting with the reflection of the ascending moon. She had already decided on her course of action and her mind would not be changed, but she still dreaded the thought of it: when she knew that Anna was far enough away for them to not be caught together, she would leave the cavern, head towards the castle, and tell her father exactly what had happened since the moment she first left her room.


	15. May 17th, 1923

**May 17****th****, 1923**

I am writing this from a rather unusual place – whereas I might usually write from my study in the evening, I can barely see the ink from my pen at this late hour for I am sat in the rather dim nursery. At last, we have been allowed to see Sophia, although for all the wrong reasons.

Perhaps it is just my mind playing tricks on me in its state of fatigue, but I am sure that when I awoke this morning, I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Mother has told me once or twice that she gets the same feelings when she knows that family members are soon to be in trouble, and despite never having truly believed in all that superstitious nonsense, I couldn't help but go through the start of my day somewhat cautiously.

At breakfast, Father stated that he wanted to pay a visit to dear little Sophia as his morning was free of engagements, and so he asked whether she had fully recovered from her illness. Gwen of course informed him that the girl was still struck down with it, and Father immediately asked why we had allowed the nanny to handle it alone without the oversight of the family doctor.

Gwen and I shared a moment of panic, but I am quite certain that we made decisions that were best for Sophia at the time – she has grown up with that nanny, and has shamefully probably seen more of her than either of her parents, and so we felt it only right that the nanny should care for her in her illness. However, Father was quite appalled, and immediately telephoned the doctor for an appointment at noon.

While I was concerned about Sophia, I also had Father's recent warning about _duty above family_ ringing in my ears, and so I continued with my work through the morning. Each meeting seemed trivial somehow when compared to poor Sophia's suffering; I know that Father has insisted upon my role as a monarch being more important than my role as a father, but it is on days like these when I question that theory. The love that a father can feel for a daughter certainly seems to be enough to defeat all boundaries, even those that lay down the responsibilities of a king.

Unfortunately, today was the monthly date for the clinic with the villagers, where they may drop in and confess their deepest concerns to me in front of court. This is usually an activity that I take great interest in, as my people are usually my first concern, but today those two hours felt like years. I felt most sympathy for the desperate parents who came to me with concerns for their children, though my necessity for professionalism prevented me from expressing my similar situation; however, I did move their cases to the top of our priority list for the Royal Council, which I hope may help them in some way. I know only too well the helplessness of watching your child suffer.

I made sure to finish the worst of my work by noon so that I could go to the nursery with Father and Gwen. We were all waiting anxiously outside the door when the doctor arrived and went in, but we were told not to follow – a rational precaution, I realise, but one that infuriated me all the same. I feel compelled to tell these people that this child is not only my only daughter, but heir to the throne! Her life is of paramount importance to Gwen and I.

The doctor and the nanny emerged about half an hour later, both ashen-faced and looking quite concerned. I looked at Gwen to gauge her reaction, and I could tell from her face that she felt the same as I did: their expressions could not mean good news. We were allowed in to see her, though not all at the same time – Father waited outside with the doctor and nanny so as not to overwhelm the poor child, and so he was told the doctor's verdict before us.

Sophia is heartbreakingly pale and weak now. I still recall when she was a joyous little child, always giggling and so full of curiosity about the world around her. For the past month, her life has been a constant battle with this illness, and I watched powerlessly as Gwen wept by her bedside. She is two years old, and has so much of her life left to live – I silently resolved in that cramped little nursery to show her as much of our kingdom as possible when she is better.

When we went back into the corridor to receive the doctor's news, he was still in deep discussion with Father, who had inherited the very glum expression that the doctor had worn when he had inspected our daughter. This is a moment that I dread to recall, but once again, I know that I must.

The doctor informed us that Sophia is in a worse state than we had previously been told. Our nanny, whose concern for our feelings is well-meaning but naive, had purposefully withheld the most sensitive information about her to preserve our optimism. In reality, Sophia is suffering from a fever that has been travelling between kingdoms over the past few months, always taking children and the elderly as victims. According to his medical experience, there is no known cure, but a long treatment of rest and care should see her recovering eventually – although not without permanent scarring.

Like a pox, the fever can take hold of one's immune system and wield it against one as a weapon, creating angry little sores all over the skin. I had noticed that Sophia's porcelain skin was speckled with the occasional blemish since the beginning of the month, but as I sickeningly realise now, I had only ever seen her face – for the rest of her body, there must have been a million similar marks to irritate her with itches. If I could bear that pain for her, I know that I would in a hummingbird's heartbeat.

The little specks are so potent against the skin that they may only fade and never disappear, though the doctor is uncertain; as the fever is so new to medical history, his only knowledge of the disease comes from the rare cases amongst Arendelle villagers and medical fairs, where worst-case scenarios are often shamelessly touted to substantiate the sale of faux 'miracle cures'. Even if she is left with the flawless skin that she had at birth, her legs may be so weak from the lack of use that her walk could be impeded by a limp or stumble.

Gwen and I could bear no more of the doctor's gruesome details, and so we paid him for his services before going swiftly to the lounge. The servants offered to serve lunch, but we were in no mood to eat – neither were we in any mood to discuss what should happen to the nanny, though we all agreed that her services would not be required for the care of the new baby. Her case was not one of neglect, but simply retention of important information from her employer, which Father argued was a criminal act but which Gwen and I were less sure about.

Mother was busy all day at a charity convention in the neighbouring kingdom, and so the three of us simply sat around the fire together, telling stories about Sophia and making promises we would forget within the hour. However, I am certain about one thing: Sophia will recover. We are the royal family, after all! We can get the best healthcare, the best nanny, the best advice in the whole kingdom! When she is better, we shall not let ourselves forget how close we came to losing her. I love Sophia more than I have ever loved anything else in this world, and that child will be loved evermore once we get out of these circumstances.

I spent the rest of my dreary day trying to concentrate on the remainders of my business, but I found myself constantly distracted by thoughts of my family, so I disregarded Father's earlier advice and deserted my duties by early evening to visit the nursery. The nanny, whose reputation has been shattered and so whose right to refuse access to my daughter has been revoked, let me in without complaint. I noticed a half-packed suitcase in the corner, and while I have slight pity for the woman, I am infinitely more concerned with the welfare of the child.

Gwen was already in the nursery when I arrived, and we spent the rest of the evening sat by her bed, stroking her hair and trying to comfort her as best we could. As soon as Mother arrived back at the castle, she joined us, and Father soon followed. I hate to think of it as a vigil, for that sounds so hopeless a word, but I reluctantly recognise that is the appropriate name. I am still sat in the nursery with Gwen now, though Mother and Father have regretfully retired. The room is small – I have sworn to Gwen that we will find a larger room in this castle to accommodate Sophia and the new arrival when it comes – but I would rather be here than in bed, where I would only be worrying about the state of our daughter.

Her name keeps ringing through my mind like a siren, and every few moments I look up to check that she is still lying there in silent sleep, not convulsing with the nightmarish fits that I have pictured her suffering in the night. This fever will pass, I am sure, but not without our care. I intend to sit here for as long as my draining energy will allow, and my head shall not think of anything but Sophia until I know that she is well again.

Alfred.

* * *

**Author's Note: **Hello again! I just wanted to add in another note about how much I appreciate the support from you guys in your reviews, follows and favourites of this story. It really is lovely to see that people are enjoying reading it, and it definitely encourages me to keep updating! :) Thanks again for your amazing comments, and happy new year!


	16. Blue Blood

Elsa stole back into the castle like a thief in the night. Her excursions with Dalli had taught her a few tricks about sneaking in and out, but she still cautiously endeavoured to be silent as she slipped her key into the door of the servants' quarters; the rusty little device had been a small gift from her father a few years ago, when his fears about her powers almost reached the point of paranoia. He had been convinced that if the kingdom discovered her true state and came to the castle to seek her out, she could escape via the servants' exit, which led up from the basement towards the docks at the back of the residence.

The thought of her father sent a nervous shiver down her spine, as she knew what she had to do now. Anna, who had followed her down to the cavern and should now have returned to her room, had been hurt once again by her powers. It was her responsibility to put things right – and frustratingly, that meant telling her parents everything so that they could help her to do so.

As she pushed the door open, she cast one last look out to the fjord. If she followed her plan as intended, she might never look at the water from this angle again, as she was determined to end her rebellious outings for the sake of her duties. The water was dark and brooding, and Elsa spotted a brigade of dark grey storm clouds drifting over the horizon towards the castle; there would be a storm tonight, she predicted, and she did not want to be out in the open to see it.

Elsa quickly went inside and hurried through the narrow hallways – there was always the risk of being caught by a servant, though it was almost time for the evening meal and so she guessed that everyone would be too busy in the kitchens to see her. The route was already planned out in her mind, and she followed it with strong resolve. It would be better to get the confession out of the way quickly than to drag it out, so as to begin the recovery from this minor blip in her obedience as soon as possible.

She breathed a quiet sigh of relief when she reached the spiral staircase that would lead up to the ground floor of the castle, because the corridor that led from its top would snake around the lounge. Her father, who was not known for breaking old traditions, was probably still prone to sitting in the lounge before the evening meal as he had been when she was a child. The memories of those times flooded her mind momentarily and she winced with nostalgia, but she quickly shoved those thoughts away and focused on the task at hand.

Her memory of exploring the servants' quarters with Anna had luckily turned out to be quite reliable as her recent escapades had proven, and they did not disappoint her when she emerged from the staircase into exactly the corridor she wanted. With a few more hurried steps – she was almost at a jogging pace now due to her mounting anxiety, though she had no need to rush – she reached the door of the lounge. All that was required of her now to begin the process of the apology was to go in.

Elsa considered simply pushing open the grand oak door and strolling in, but it occurred to her that perhaps that would be too direct. Would it be better to retrace her steps and go through the servants' entrance at the side of the hall? No, no, that would simply confuse her father. She had to knock.

She was glad of the lilac glove covering her knuckles at that moment, because without their protection, she feared that her emotion might freeze the whole doorway to immovable ice. With trembling fingertips, she gently rapped on the sturdy oak.

"Come in." That was certainly the sound of her father's voice.

For a moment, she considered turning away and going back to her room. Dalli was due to leave tomorrow and it would be easy to avoid him until then, pretending to everybody else that they had never met. However, that would not be honest or fair to her parents, and so she forced herself to push open the door and sidle sheepishly into the large, fire-lit lounge.

Her father was sat in his large padded chair by the fireside, as she had expected, but she realised suddenly that he was not alone – in the chair opposite his sat a tall, spindly man whose body seemed so angular and strange against the plush seat that he was almost like a caricature of himself; he was clothed in beautiful bejewelled robes, each gem threaded into an intricate pattern that depicted waves and great battles fought on foreign shores. She recognised that style of clothing instantly, and her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. He was undoubtedly the King of Groveston.

Both men turned around at the sound of her entrance, and despite being quite a distance away from him at the opposite side of the lounge, she heard her father gasp at the sight of her. "Elsa!" he exclaimed in a voice that shook with uncertainty, casting a sideways look at his guest to gauge his reaction. The visiting monarch just looked slightly confused at the appearance of the king's supposedly reclusive daughter. "Allow me to introduce my eldest child, Elsa. What . . . what are you doing here?"

"I . . ." Her nerve seemed to melt in the face of spectators. "I have to tell you something." She grasped her hands together uncomfortably, hoping that the Groveston King might announce an unexpected reason to leave and excuse himself from the room. He did not move.

Her father frowned, and beckoned her closer so that she could feel the benefit of the fire on the cold evening. "This is unusual," he remarked with a nervous laugh, carefully inspecting the faces of his daughter and his guest in turn. "What is this about?"

Elsa took a deep breath and met the gaze of the visiting King. "It's partially about Groveston, I suppose – although it's mostly an apology."

"An apology for what?" her father responded quickly, eyes narrowing. He didn't mean to be suspicious of his daughter but an apology coming from her mouth seemed unnervingly unusual; it was usually Anna, the more reckless of his two children, that would hold such regrets. The visiting monarch sat and watched in silent appraisal, hands folded neatly over his lap.

She cleared her throat nervously. "I've done some things that I don't think are right for an heir to the throne." She once again caught the gaze of the Groveston King, and frowned. "However, they are a little private, so . . ."

The man looked at her blankly, and spoke for the first time since her arrival. "Didn't you say that this news involved Groveston?" he asked slowly. His voice was low and soft, with a slightly exotic accent – her belly lurched as she recalled that was the accent she heard in Dalli's voice.

"Yes – yes, it does," she admitted in a halting tone.

"So wouldn't you think that I might be allowed to hear it?" he continued further, his icy blue eyes focusing so intently on hers that she feared they might see through to her thoughts. "I am the King of Groveston, after all."

"It's wonderful to meet you, Your Majesty," Elsa replied instinctively though her mind was racing with panicked thoughts. She shared a frantic glance with her father, and acknowledged his expression of resigned acceptance before nodding at the monarch slowly. "Yes. Perhaps you should hear it," she muttered.

The King gave a slight smile to encourage her, before leaning back into his chair and raising her eyebrows as if asking her to begin. Elsa tucked her hands behind her back and shut her eyes – she had spent a long time wondering how to begin the story in a diplomatic manner, but every one of her plans now had to be readjusted for the presence of the Groveston monarch.

"You visited me in my room a little while ago, before my birthday – do you remember?" She addressed the question to her father, who gave a quiet murmur to confirm that he did. "It was on the day that the Groveston royal family – or rather, your family, Your Majesty – arrived at the docks. Well, after you left, I decided that I . . . I decided that I wanted to leave my room."

Her father tried to appear unaffected, but his hand immediately clenched around the soft armrest of the chair at the sound of her words. He knew that her powers had to be kept concealed from the visiting monarch, and so he pretended that this was not an abnormal occurrence. "Alright," he muttered in a low tone.

"When I was out in the corridor, I met a boy – a Groveston servant. His name is Dalli," Elsa added quickly, searching the monarch's face for any sign of recognition. After a few seconds, the visiting king nodded in a vague expression of recollection, and she continued. "We started to talk, and he asked me if I wanted to leave."

"The castle?" her father asked immediately, fingers gripping the chair tighter now.

Elsa nodded guiltily. "Yes."

The Groveston monarch suddenly gave a short, knowing chuckle from his chair. "Is this a story of young love?" he asked, grinning up at Elsa's confused expression. "You know, you mustn't apologise for falling in love, my dear. It is a thing of natural beauty."

"We aren't in love," she responded quickly, though the smile did not fade from his face – infuriatingly, her denial only made the man's suggestion seem more accurate. "We just left the castle."

"That's not forbidden, is it?" the monarch joked further. The deathly hush that greeted his light-hearted remark seemed to slowly steal his grin away. "Is it?" he repeated more seriously.

Elsa's father had his gaze focused on the pattern of the carpet, refusing to acknowledge either of them in his restrained fury. "You'll have heard the rumours about my daughter, I'm sure," he muttered monotonously.

The Groveston king's eyes flitted between the girl and her father. Gradually, his mouth opened in growing surprise. "Is she really not allowed out of her room?" he said, tone rising with shock. "Why not?"

Elsa looked at her feet in embarrassment, before glancing up to catch the inquisitive eyes of the guest. "Because of this," she replied quietly. Shutting her eyes to focus on the control of her powers – just as she had practised with Dalli, she remembered with a jolt of hurt – she suddenly thrust her hand out towards the fire with a grunt of effort. A shot of white ice flew from her fingertips and within a second, the crackling fire was little more than a sizzle in the mantelpiece.

The guest sat for a few moments in a bemused stupor. He opened his mouth to respond once or twice, but seemed to have been struck into silence by the spectacle, and so Elsa spoke for him.

"My powers are dangerous," she muttered solemnly. "I normally keep to myself in my room because I don't want anybody else to get hurt, but on that day, I was reckless and stupid." This was the part of her speech which she could recite from the constant rehearsals in her head. "When I left my room, my powers flared up, and Dalli saw them."

Her father shook his head and rubbed his tired eyes with the fingers of both hands. "You're right," he remarked bitterly. "That was a reckless and _stupid_ thing to do, Elsa! What if he passes that knowledge around the servants' table? What if the gossip spreads?"

"It won't!" she exclaimed in protest. "I trust him. It wasn't just a coincidence that we met, Father – we were supposed to meet so that he could help me to control my powers, and he has helped me. It was fate."

Both men looked at her in puzzlement. "What do you mean?" her father enquired.

"Dalli told me about Groveston being the kingdom of the oracles." Elsa momentarily glanced at the visiting monarch for confirmation of this, and he nodded silently. "He told me that while he was on the ship to Arendelle, he had a vision that we were supposed to meet. It took us a little while to figure out why, but then we realised that maybe fate wanted us to meet because I was unhappy and I needed his help." The words came out in a hurried burble, but as this was perhaps the pivotal moment of her lengthy apology, it brought her the most shame to reveal it.

Elsa expected the Groveston king to nod again, but when she looked to him, his skin seemed to have been drained of all its colour; he sat stiffly in his chair and clasped his hands together on his lap, pale skin illuminated by the firelight. "What's wrong?" she whispered, a sense of dread growing in her stomach. Her heart sank further with every second he spent in silence.

"Elsa," he murmured in a barely audible tone once he had recovered from his shock. "It's true that my kingdom is called the kingdom of oracles, but there are only a handful of people in the whole land that actually receive visions. Even then, it is a trait that usually runs through blue blood – no servant or peasant has ever been born with that gift."

The room seemed to be rapidly shrinking around her, and her pulse quickened. She could hear her heartbeat thumping rapidly in her ears. "What do you mean?" she asked softly, though she feared she already knew.

"Dalli wasn't there because he saw that day in a vision – it is impossible that he could have the gift of future sight," the monarch uttered tentatively. "I don't know how and I don't know why he came to find you, but it certainly wasn't down to fate."


	17. Cold, Hard Ice

The huge oak door of the lounge froze over immediately at the touch of her shaking fingers, but Elsa had larger concerns at that moment. For the first time in years, she felt absolutely irreverent of what people might think if they saw her powers now; she had come to the somewhat liberating conclusion that those people could think whatever they liked. She only cared about finding Dalli.

She had slammed the door behind her when she left the lounge, and a hushed voice at the back of her mind told her that it was rude to suddenly run out of a room like that, but she ignored it. The loudest thought in her mind was telling her to go to the servants' quarters to find Dalli tonight, before he departed for Groveston and she was left forever without the answer to her one question: _why?_

Elsa hurried down the long corridor that she had used to reach the lounge, and had almost reached the spiral staircase when she was stopped by a noise. It was the clanging of feet coming up the metal stairs, and if she had been behaving sensibly, she might have swiftly run away and found somewhere safe to hide – however, she had already decided that she would not behave sensibly until she could make sense of what was happening around her, and so she merely stood at the top of the stairs and waited for whoever was coming to emerge.

By the time the familiar face of her sister peeked over the top of the stairs, Elsa's powers had frozen white the oil of each painting on the wall. "Anna!" she exclaimed loudly, the sudden shock causing her powers to jolt and crackle over the frames of each portrait.

"You look so . . ." Anna struggled for a moment to come up with the correct word, but her eyes were distracted by the strands of ice creeping across the walls. "You look upset," she finished awkwardly. Elsa sensed that 'upset' was not the word her sister was looking for.

"I need to go to the servants' quarters and find Dalli – the guy that was in the cavern earlier," she explained breathlessly, her mood caught somewhere between shaken and furious. The two sisters stood in silence for a moment before Elsa gestured frantically to the staircase. "It's urgent! I have to get down there!"

"He's not there!" Anna responded quickly. She let the statement hang in the air between them before a sheepish grin began to spread nervously across her face.

Elsa's eyes narrowed as she watched her sister slowly ascend the remainder of the brass steps. "How do you know?" she asked suspiciously, aware that her sister had only seen the boy for a few brief moments without even knowing his name that afternoon. "Have you spoken to him?"

"Um, maybe." Anna's eyes darted between Elsa's gaze and the ice that was travelling along the corridor walls. As desperate as she was to savour the few moments she had with her sister, she was aware that the older girl seemed to be in no mood for waiting. "I just went to see him because I felt guilty about interrupting your, um, conversation at the cavern. I went to your room to apologise, but you weren't there, so I went looking for him."

"How could you find him when you didn't even know his name?" Elsa enquired, her rage momentarily overrun by her curiosity.

Anna grinned again and tugged gingerly at the green ribbon around her auburn hair. "I'm pretty good at describing people, I guess," she muttered with a quiet giggle. "I talked about him a bit and got the Groveston butler to show me to his room. Do you know how tiny those little rooms are for the servants? You can hardly move in them!"

"Y-yes, I'm sure," her sister responded, distracted for a moment. "What did he say?"

"He didn't talk much," Anna sighed a little sadly, "but I suppose that was alright, because I could do all the talking for both of us. I basically apologised for interrupting you guys at the cavern, and offered to make it up to you."

"How?" Elsa felt guilty for dismissing her sister so abruptly in this way, but her time was limited and her mind was already teeming with questions for the boy.

"You never got to finish whatever it was you started in there," her sister said with a shy smile. "I know it's none of my business, but . . . even if you have to protect me, I'm glad you have somebody, Elsa. I don't want to see you lose that, so I told him to meet you by the fjord tonight."

Elsa swallowed hard at another kick of guilt deep in her stomach, but held her tongue and simply smiled at Anna's sweet remarks. Though her sister had a rather optimistic view of the meeting that she had arranged, given that she had not just heard about Dalli's lies, Elsa was grateful for her help. "Do you know when and where on the fjord?" she asked more softly, her temper mellowing in the younger girl's presence.

"He didn't say where, but I told him to go as soon as possible and just wait for you. I was hoping that you would agree to meet him, because otherwise I'm going to have to go out there and tell him that it's off, and he seemed so excited to see you again." Anna smiled encouragingly at her sister, eyebrows raised in expectation. "So, will you go?"

Her belly began to ache with worry at the prospect of seeing Dalli again after the Groveston King's revelation, but she nodded nonetheless. Anna let out a squeal of joy and ran to hug her sister, but immediately reeled away at the sight of the ice continuing to spread over the castle walls.

"I knew it!" Anna screeched with a childish kind of happiness – Elsa envied her ability to assume that her relationship with Dalli was entirely romantic. _If only I could tell her the truth about him, just as I was told._ The thought appeared in her head quite suddenly, but she didn't want to ruin her younger sister's good mood, and so she smiled along with her. "Good luck, Elsa!"

The older sister indicated towards the staircase that Anna was still blocking, which encouraged the fifteen-year-old to jump up with realisation and move. "I'll need to leave through the servants' exit," Elsa explained quickly as she headed towards the stairs. She looked back at her sister as she went down the first step. "Thanks for doing this, Anna."

"It's no problem!" the girl laughed back. There were a few moments of quiet as Elsa descended the stairs and the ice began to thaw on the frosted walls, but Anna couldn't help herself from piping up again. "Oh, and Elsa?"

Elsa turned back to meet her sister's gaze. "What is it?"

"Will you come and tell me about it when you get back?" Anna's eyes shone with doubtful hope as she posed the tentative question. "I'll wait up for you. Just come to my door, and I'll let you in."

The older girl drew in her lips in thought, but she couldn't bear to say no. "Maybe," she whispered in hesitated response with a half-smile. "Don't wait up."

"Alright, I won't," Anna lied, before giving her sister a final wave and rushing off to wherever her dreaming heart was to lead her next.

* * *

The storm had settled over Arendelle and the starry sky was rendered blank by a stretch of black rainclouds. As Elsa dipped out of the servants' exit with her new Groveston cloak wrapped around her shoulders, she felt a few large droplets of rain landing on her face, and so she pulled the hood over her head. It offered her little protection from the increasingly heavy rain, but at least it acted as a form of disguise for anyone who might spot her – though no sane villager would venture out in this violent weather anyway.

It would only have taken her a few minutes to walk from the castle down to the waterside, but she did not have time to waste – with each moment she spent in the building storm, her anger grew. She set her pace at a controlled but hurried trot, dark cloak billowing behind her in the strong wind, and tried to mentally compose the words she might say to Dalli. The fundamental base of her relationship with him, in which she had invested so much of her time and effort, was based on a lie. So how much of their relationship had actually been true?

The question hurt to consider, but it fuelled her anger, and so she repeated it over and over as if searching for an answer herself. Of course, she could not answer it. This was his crime to answer for – _he had done this_. By the time she spotted his distinctive dark cloak on the end of a deserted dock, she was so infuriated by the thought of him that she struggled to keep herself from pushing him straight into the fjord.

"Dalli!" she shouted over the howling wind. He did not yet know that she was aware of his lies – but he was certainly about to find out.

He spun around to face her with an uncertain smile on his face. "Elsa," he sighed in relief as she reached the wooden dock and stopped a few paces away from him. "I thought that you wouldn't come. I thought that you wouldn't speak to me again, and I'd have to leave tomorrow without telling you the truth."

"I already know the truth," she snapped furiously, steely eyes glinting with unrestrained wrath. "I know that you're not an oracle, Dalli."

The words rushed out of her mouth like a cascade of water, but she felt better for their release. He seemed momentarily stunned, and he struggled to formulate an answer in his mind. "That – that's not what I meant by the truth."

"I don't care what you meant! I just want to get some answers." The wind was howling, but she was determined to be heard, and so her voice had reached an unsustainable level of volume. However, at that moment, the prospect of losing her voice didn't seem nearly as important to Elsa as the thought of Dalli escaping Arendelle without giving her an explanation for his deceit. "Why did you tell me that it was fate? What kind of person are you, to lie like that just for fun?"

Dalli shook his head desperately. "I didn't say it for fun, Elsa! I love you." The sound of the storm overwhelmed them for a couple of seconds, and all they could do was stare at each other in silence. "I lied because I love you. That's the truth I was going to tell you tonight."

"That doesn't make any sense!" Elsa exclaimed, though the passion that had built up within her on the way to the fjord seemed to have been partly quelled somehow by his words. She hadn't heard those particular words in a long time, and she was a little bewildered when she heard him say them. "You couldn't have loved me before you met me, Dalli. That's not possible."

"Maybe I didn't love you back then, but I knew that I needed to find you." He took a few deep breaths, keeping his eyes on her at all times. "They kept spreading rumours on the ship to Arendelle about the hidden princess, and nobody believed them – nobody but me. I heard your story, Elsa, and I knew that I needed to help. I felt sorry for you."

Elsa shut her eyes to the sight of him and just listened to the storm for a few moments. She felt nothing in her heart for him now but cold, hard ice. "You shouldn't have listened to the rumours, Dalli," she murmured, though her voice was so quiet that it was whipped away by the wind and she was rendered inaudible. "Everything was better before I met you."

He frowned at her as she reopened her eyes. "What?" he called over the rising wind.

"I said," she repeated in a rapidly rising tone, "everything was better before I met _you_!" On the final word, she instinctively thrust a pointed finger towards him, and the sudden shot of ice that flew from it sailed straight despite the relentless wind and hit Dalli square in the heart.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Hello again! So, I just wanted to pop in again and say thanks for your continual support for this story - it is still a pleasure to read a new review or see a new follow or favourite, and I love the thought of people reading this story and enjoying it! Thanks for your kindness, and I hope you enjoy what's coming next - I have certainly enjoyed reading your responses to the last couple of chapters (and I apologise if you're confused - all will be revealed). All I can tell you about what's coming next is that it's going to be an adventure ;D Thanks again, and bye!


	18. Unanchored

"Dalli!"

Elsa's anguished wail was lost to the howling wind that whipped around them on the dock. The storm seemed to be growing even larger now, and the pounding rain blurred her vision as she rushed to the boy's side. Her powers had knocked him backwards so that he was lying awkwardly on his back, body resting on the sodden wood and head dangling over the choppy waters. She dropped to his side and hurriedly rearranged him so that his head was supported, before peering desperately into his half-shut eyes.

"Dalli, I'm so sorry!" Her cries were too faint to be heard over the storm, but she didn't have the energy to raise her voice; she was too overwhelmed by the enormity of what had occurred. "I didn't mean to hurt you . . . I never meant to hurt you like this . . ." Elsa's words came out in stilted bursts as her breathing shifted into a pattern of stifled sobs. "I'm so sorry . . ."

His eyes were focused on hers, but he remained unnervingly silent. Eventually, his mouth began to twitch with the laboured formation of a sentence, though his mouth and mind were undeniably compromised by the force of the strike. "Help," he forced out in a mumble through his sluggish tongue.

"I don't know how!" Elsa responded in a hopeless sob, lowering her forehead so that it almost touched his drenched chest. She so desperately wanted to remember what had happened when her powers had hurt Anna – even the thought of it sickened her to the point of revulsion now, as she had once again lost control of herself and hurt somebody she loved – but her mind was filled with the constantly replaying image of Dalli, struck down by her fury.

The boy's pained features contorted into a pleading expression. "Please, Elsa," he said in barely a whisper. The storm stole the sound from his mouth, but Elsa knew what he was trying to say. She could only wish hopelessly for her memory to return in time to save him from whatever it was that might curse him now – it was Anna's head that she had hit last time. Would it be any different from the heart? Would the trolls still be able to fix it?

_The trolls!_ Of course! The idea jolted so suddenly into Elsa's head that she physically jumped, and an agonised cry came from Dalli's mouth as she accidentally knocked his side in the process. "I know where we have to go," she muttered breathlessly as she considered the solution.

Where did the trolls live? She recalled a mossy forest, but her memory was dishearteningly blank when she tried to remember how they got there. However, she did remember a short trip down the fjord to reach it, and so she quickly decided on beginning with that and seeing if she recognise the scenery from the sea – it was not at all like her to think so recklessly, but it there was no time for indecision. She could be fickle and pore over every option on other nights, but now Dalli needed her immediate help, and no matter what he had done to her, she refused to let him down.

Elsa considered running up to the castle to ask for help, but she told herself that even if she was courageous enough to do that, it would take too long. Bobbing on the unruly water beside the dock was a little rowboat, made of splintering wood but bravely resisting the force of the storm; her only option was the rowboat, and though the thought of it frightened her, she resigned herself to it and began to drag Dalli into the vessel.

"Are you sure?" he forced out in a strangled cough as his body was awkwardly shoved into the boat. A series of pained grunts came from his mouth every time he was accidentally hurt, but Elsa admired him for being otherwise silent – the expression on his face alone told her that he was in agony.

She finally shifted him so that he was lying down, head resting on the seat facing her, and carefully placed herself in between the oars. "No," she replied honestly, "but I'm going to try anyway." Elsa leaned forward to shakily untie their vessel from the dock, leaving them unanchored. The boat was already leaping up and down on the turbulent sea, but she forced herself to wrap her hands around the unfamiliar oars and propel them away from the dock.

For the first few strokes the boat didn't seem to move at all, but her persistent rowing finally pushed their boat out into the free water. She feared that the sky was too dark to tell where they were going – nevertheless, she knew the map on the wall of her bedroom too well to get lost. On a pleasant day, the trip to the little dock on the other side of the fjord that she was thinking of would take ten minutes. However, this certainly was not a pleasant day.

Dalli gave another soft groan from where he lay on the floor, and stretched his arms to clench the edges of the boat. Though she was facing him, she was concentrating too determinedly on forcing their way through the choppy water to notice that he was watching her intently. "I'm sorry, Elsa," he muttered in as loud a voice as he could muster. "I'm sorry about this."

She frowned at the noise, barely distinguishable over the rumbling of the storm, and quickly swept the hood back from her head to see where it had come from. As her hair was quickly drenched by the relentless rain, she recognised it as his voice. "I'm sorry," she responded in a frustrated shout. "I didn't mean to hurt you!"

"What I said was true," Dalli murmured quietly – Elsa had to read his lips to catch the words now, but she knew the shape of his mouth well enough to understand what he meant. "I heard your story and I wanted to find you. I couldn't bear the thought of you being trapped in that castle alone."

"How did you know that the story was true?" she asked in a grunt as she propelled their boat through a particularly large wave – a splash of icy water leapt up from the head of the boat and landed on her shoulders, but she ignored it. She was too busy searching his pained expression to notice as the water began to freeze around her feet. "Why did you believe it?"

"There was a boy on the boat who seemed to know all about it," he wheezed in response. "He was only fifteen, but he's the prince of the Isles of somewhere-or-another and he was convinced that your powers were real. I don't know why he knew as much as he did about you, but after listening to him for a while, I thought there might be some truth in what he was saying."

She managed to shoot him a smirk from across the boat despite her arms now aching with the effort of rowing. It seemed that she was pushing harder with the oars but going slower and slower with each stroke, though her eyes were still trained too firmly on Dalli's to feel the water beginning to freeze around the boat. "So, just on the basis of a teenager's stories, you went to see if you could find me as soon as you got off the ship?"

Dalli was gradually losing consciousness as the ice spread from his heart, but a small smile stretched across his face as he heard Elsa's voice. "I may not be an oracle," he whispered faintly, "but I think I knew even then that this was meant to be."

Before she could respond, she realised that her feet felt unusually cold. One glance at the bottom of the boat told her why each stroke of the oars was becoming more laboured: the water around them was freezing, and each time she pushed the boat forward, it had to break through a thin layer of ice to move.

"No!" she exclaimed in exasperation as her powers claimed each wave around them. With a glance to the scenery behind her, she could just about see that the little dock she remembered was still standing on a shore that was painfully close – if she could get the boat to move a little further, just a _little bit further_, they would be at their destination.

Dalli was unconscious on the seat opposite her, and the storm was showing no sign of easing. Elsa prised her stiff fingers from the oars and used them to rub away the rain dripping down her face before burying her head in her hands. The boat had come to a complete halt now, and they were stranded in the middle of the fjord with a sheet of white ice expanding over the water around them.

"Was this meant to be?" Elsa screeched hopelessly through the tears that she could no longer hold back. She wasn't asking anybody in particular this question, but these were the words that she was unable to hold in anymore. "Is this how love is supposed to be?"

Though she couldn't see it unfolding around her, the spread of ice began to slow.

"Why do my powers always hurt the people that matter most to me? First it was Anna," she exclaimed, "and now it's Dalli!"

The ice was shrinking. She remained oblivious.

"I can't even save him because of this stupid ice!" A sob shuddered through her frail body as she remained crumpled on her seat. "I would do anything to save his life. Anything! Because I suppose . . . I suppose that I love him. I love you." She looked up at Dalli through tear-blurred eyes just in time to see the final inches of ice around the boat melt away.

With a sudden drop, the boat plunged back into free water, and Elsa gasped. Her hands immediately wrapped themselves around the oars once more, and she didn't have to think about what to do next; grunting in effort, she forced them back into the raging sea and propelled their little rowboat towards the dock.

Though the wind was still howling around them and rain had drenched them both to the point of dripping, her energy would not be depleted. Elsa forced that boat through the violent storm, ignoring each raindrop and gust of wind that attempted to impede her, and within a few short minutes they had reached the dock. As she frantically tied down the rope of their little rowboat to the dock's leg, she didn't see Dalli silently whispering that he loved her too.


	19. Powers and Curses

The lush green forest that surrounded their tiny dock was vaguely familiar, but Elsa still stared anxiously into its dark depths as if it might hide a thousand secrets. She hurriedly pulled on the soaking rope that dangled from the end of the dock and tied it around the hull of the rowboat, before stumbling awkwardly on to the splintering wooden boards of the old platform.

The wood gave a worrying creak as if it might give way, but her thoughts were focused on other things as she reached back into the boat and grabbed Dalli's cloak. He was only just regaining consciousness but was still too weak to walk, and so she had to carefully shift him inch by inch toward the edge of the boat until she could pull him and place his arm over her back. They took a few uncertain steps together, Elsa struggling to support his weight for a shaky moment or two, but by the time they had reached the end of the rickety dock they had worked out a strange rhythm to which they stuck.

As the pair hobbled further into the woods, still being pelted with the unforgiving rain and wind, Elsa tried to disguise the fact that she was lost. This was a dark forest that she had rushed through with her parents ten years ago, and her memory only supplied her with faded images of the little trolls that had saved her sister. Dalli could be of no help as he was still barely conscious and slumped over her shoulders, trying to walk alongside her but never quite managing a full step.

"Can anybody help?" Elsa called out tentatively into the night, casting her eyes hopefully around the dank woodland that surrounded them. They were ambling further and further into the wilderness without any clear destination, and the panic that was beginning to rise in her belly sent a few vines of ice creeping up the trunks of the trees they passed. "Is there anybody here? Anybody?"

The trees began to thin around them as they walked and Elsa gradually felt more drops of water landing on her drenched cloak – despite the terrifying darkness that the leafy canopy had created by blocking out the moonlight, it had offered some respite from the pouring rain. She guided Dalli into a clearing of mossy boulders that she recognised somehow, although it felt almost as if they had appeared in a dream of hers because her mind could not identify them.

Dalli gave a loud groan of sudden pain by her side, and she immediately lay him down on the mossy forest floor. "I'm trying to help you," she explained miserably as she held his head in her hands, gently stroking his sodden hair. "I just can't seem to do anything right." She hung her head in sorrow and clenched her eyes shut, feeling a lump building in her throat again.

"Princess Elsa?"

Her head immediately snapped up at the sound of the little voice to see that the boulders had disappeared, and in their place stood a collective of the little moss-covered trolls that she recalled from her childhood. "Oh, thank you!" she exclaimed loudly, examining the bemused expressions of the creatures that were watching her cradle Dalli's head intensely. "I need your help."

One troll, significantly larger and more intricately decorated than the rest, slowly walked forwards until he was stood at the front of the crowd. "You have been here once before," he commented gravely, eyes carefully inspecting the softly groaning body of the boy on the grass. "It was for your powers, wasn't it?"

"Yes," Elsa admitted stiltedly as she lowered her gaze. "Last time it was my sister, Anna, but now it's my . . ." She searched Dalli's agonised face momentarily, as if his expression might give her the appropriate word for their relationship. "It's my friend," she sighed eventually.

The leader of the trolls said nothing in response, but turned and beckoned to a couple of the spectators in the crowd behind him. They gathered together in a hushed discussion at Dalli's feet, every now and again peering up at her and then retreating back into their huddle. Eventually, the largest troll emerged once again and shot Elsa a grim glance.

"Was he hit in the heart by your ice?" he asked curtly as he approached the boy's chest. Elsa responded with a hurried nod. "You know, your sister was quite easily saved from your powers because you only hurt her head. The heart is a very different matter."

"Can you help him?" she asked desperately, watching as the troll pressed his green fingers to different parts of Dalli's flesh. Each prod evoked a different groan of pain from the boy's mouth, and Elsa felt a sudden desire to hold his head again as if this might protect him from the pain.

The troll took a deep, difficult breath. "On the rare occasions that this has occurred in the past, an act of true love has broken the curse – but this . . . this is a situation I have only ever read about in the past."

She clutched at the sleeve of Dalli's cloak. "How is this different?" she asked fearfully.

A second, smaller troll who had been involved in the leader's earlier discussions silently approached them and went to rest her small hand on Elsa's arm. "It is the storm – powers and curses are strengthened in storms. If your friend's condition was merely dependent on an act of true love, he would be quite well by now." She caught the eye of the princess and gave her a wise, knowing half-smile.

"Do you mean that you can't save him?" Elsa spluttered in disbelief. Tears were threatening to roll down her cheeks now as she surveyed Dalli's emotionless face – the boy had drifted back into numb unconsciousness.

"We can," the leader reassured her, though his tone remained decidedly gloomy. "However, it will take more than just an act of love, Your Highness. It will take a sacrifice to save your friend's life."

"What kind of sacrifice?" she responded immediately.

The female troll lowered her head sadly and looked down at Dalli's closed eyes. "It must be a life for a life. If you want him to live, then another must die."

Elsa's throat was shaken by violent sobs as she clenched her fist around the sleeve of the boy's cloak. _Somebody has to die because of my powers. _The haunting thought sent streams of tears flooding from her eyes and she slowly keeled over until her eyes were buried in the material over Dalli's chest. _Somebody has to die._

The leader of the trolls gestured for his female companion to retreat back into the crowd, which she did dutifully but with a mournful expression. "You have until dawn to decide whether you will sacrifice another to save his life," he muttered grievously. "Though you cannot know who will take his place, the decision must be made soon – by the time the day breaks, your powers will have grown too strong inside of him, and it will be too late."

Elsa hoped that Dalli could not hear the troll's fatal prophecy – a part of her wished that she had never heard it. Her eyes were wet with rushing tears as the trolls gradually moved away, presumably so that she could consider her decision. There was no way of knowing the time in this secluded area of the forest, but the depth of the night that surrounded them seemed to suggest that dawn was a few hours away yet. She had a little time.

She turned her head on his chest so that she could see the boy's face, so peaceful in his slumber. "I don't know what to do," she whispered to him in a hysterical tone, eyes clouding again with more tears. "I thought I could handle this – I thought I could leave the castle with you and that there would be no consequences because we were just having fun – but I can't. I can't do this on my own!" She desperately hoped that her cry would wake Dalli from his unconsciousness, but it was no use; he remained still and silent beneath her, and she shut her eyes and wept.

For ten long years, she had lived in a state of solitude, barely seeing a soul – and yet she had never felt lonelier than on that stormy night, as the rain dripped down from the leaves above and soaked her tired body.

Elsa laboriously drew herself up from her cocoon-like position and used her numb hands to prise open the buttons of her cloak. If she could find a candle and match in one of her pockets, she might be able to see Dalli's face in the darkness and savour that memory of their last few hours together; regardless of the curse or the ultimatum that hung above her, his ship for Groveston still departed tomorrow. They would still be forced apart.

Her search for something to light was fruitless, but a quick fumble in her inside pocket brought a familiar leather-bound book to her touch. _Of course!_ The last time she had worn this cloak, she had tucked Alfred's diary into the pocket to carry with her. Perhaps his wisdom could shed a little figurative light on the situation – his words had always helped her in the past. She pulled it out from beneath her cloak and inspected it carefully for water damage. The pages were slightly frayed at the edges but the aged ink had luckily remained in place, and there was just enough moonlight above her to make out the words in the darkness.

* * *

**Author's Note: **Hi again! This chapter is a little late, but I've had a nightmare trying to upload it. Each time I try to add a new chapter, a notice comes up from the site that tells me there's been an error, which is something I've contacted FanFiction about but they have yet to respond. Additionally, updates may take a bit longer now because I've returned to school. Much that I would rather write this story for you guys all day (because I love you all for still supporting it the way you do - it really brightens my day to see how you respond to each chapter!), I unfortunately also have to study, so I may not be able to update every day. Nevertheless, I do have a very distinct plan for this story and we still have a few chapters to go, so I will try to update as frequently as possible! :) Thanks!


	20. May 24th, 1923

**May 24****th****, 1923**

I do not have the heart to write a full entry about what has occurred today – indeed, I do not have the heart for anything. I feel as if my darling girl has taken it with her on her boundless journey, and it will never be returned to me in quite the same condition.

Sophia passed today.

I had only ever imagined it in the past, during particularly dark moments of her illness. Gwen and I had never even discussed the possibility of her . . . her passing instead of recovering. My heart cannot believe what my mind has observed, and I ache for her terribly. The thought of never again seeing her tiny belly bob up and down as she drifts through a dream is enough to bring tears to my eyes now.

My only comfort is that I know she spent her last moments in the arms of her family, wrapped up in my embrace like the vulnerable little jewel she was. In those few moments, when we knew that she was slipping from our world and we could only watch in despair, I wished beyond wishing that she might be saved and I might take her place. I prayed for that exchange of places, so that I could take the pain from her tiny tortured heart. My prayers went unanswered.

I cannot bear to sit any longer in this lonely office! It is my responsibility now to return to my family and offer them what support I can – I am bound to them by blood and our losses must be suffered together. Sophia's life is without a doubt the greatest loss that I have ever known.

Alfred.

* * *

_Your Majesty,_

_I found the following letter tucked inside one of your father's early diaries. I wondered whether I might put it with the other loose paraphernalia of his in the second library. However, it is a rather sweet tribute to the loss of his first daughter, and so I felt compelled to ask your permission._

_Enok Gunnarsson, Keeper of the Library, 1961._

* * *

Dearest Sophia,

It has been three months, one week and two days since you left us. I will not tarry too long in the labyrinth of my thinking to classify where I believe you are now – I just know that, in some spiritual manner, the three of us are still together. I feel it, just as clearly as the rhythm of my heart or the tears I have shed.

I felt that I should write this letter to you because I needed you to know something that I could not say while you were with us – possibly because even then, I did not know it. Daddy is a foolish man who believed that you would remain with us in the face of all adversity, which he knows now to be a fallacy; if the eyes of the spirits were watching us at the moment you could no longer be saved, he would have asked without hesitation to take your place.

I have tried desperately to understand over these three months the deep sorrow that has haunted my heart since that moment. I suppose that I may never understand it – to make sense of the situation, it would have to be rational and fair, and I cannot see any justice in what happened to you – but at least I can express it to you now. You are our darling girl, Sophia, and that will never change.

These were words that you did not hear from Mummy and Daddy during your brief time with us, but words that need to spoken all the same: we could not appreciate how precious your life was until we had lost it to the cruel wind that will sweep all of us away in the end. We could not understand how deeply and how vigorously we adored you until you were gone. We still adore you, Sophia.

Had I been given a blessed opportunity to rearrange fate and be taken in your place, I would have taken it without hesitation. Had I known that you would be swept from our arms as suddenly as the wind changes, I would never have left your side. These are the wishes and regrets that I will hold for as long as I breathe without you, my darling child.

With love as endless as the horizon,

Daddy.


	21. Honesty

It seemed so bittersweet that after the worst storm Elsa had ever seen came the most beautiful sunrise. The sky was alive with vibrant orange and blue, reflected in brilliant detail on the fjord; the water that had tipped and turned so violently in the night was now so calm that she couldn't see a single ripple across its smooth surface. It had been so long since she had seen the dawn, and its beauty might have astounded her if her heart wasn't leaden with guilt.

She was stood on the rickety wooden dock by their little rowboat when she heard the rustling from the trees behind her, and whirled around to face it. Dalli emerged from the thick forest, using a sturdy bough that must have fallen in the storm as a makeshift crutch, and hobbled slowly towards her.

"How do you feel?" she asked tentatively, moving forward so as to hold his arm and guide him towards the boat.

He gave her a faint but steady smile. "A lot better," he remarked in a hoarse whisper. The boy paused for a moment when he felt her touch on his arm and met her gaze. "And it's all because of you."

"I was the one who got you into this mess in the first place," Elsa remarked with a humourless smirk as she carefully helped Dalli descend into the boat. It wobbled uncertainly on the water as if it might capsize for a few seconds, but eventually he settled himself on the seat that she had occupied on their journey here. "No – I'll be rowing us back," she said firmly, shooing him on to the opposite seat.

"You've done too much for me already," he responded seriously. The leader of the trolls emerged from the woods and was moving towards them when Dalli held out a hand towards Elsa to ask her to stay. "I honestly cannot thank you enough for what you've done for me."

She was caught off guard for a few seconds, before shooting him a weary half-smile. "Don't mention it," she muttered in exhaustion as she walked to the end of the dock to greet the approaching troll.

"Your Highness," he greeted her solemnly. "I must tell you that I greatly admire your decision. To sacrifice another for the sake of love is . . . it's not an ultimatum that I would wish to face."

"And I hope that you never have to," Elsa responded gravely. She extended a hand to pat the troll's shoulder, noticing the long strands of hair growing there were matted with sweat from their stressful night. "Thank you for your help."

He closed his eyes and nodded. "It has been an honour – although with all due respect, Your Highness, I hope not to see you here again." The troll placed his own cool, stony hand on hers. "At least, I hope not to see you in such dire circumstances."

"Of course," she responded naturally. They stood that way for a few moments, gazing at each other in shared but concealed sorrow, before she drew herself away. Elsa had walked a few paces towards the boat when she turned back quite swiftly, and returned to the side of the troll. "I just have one more question."

The troll nodded, frowning at her return. "What is it, Princess?"

She leaned closer towards his ear and lowered her tone in the hope that Dalli wouldn't hear her. "Is there any way of knowing what will happen now? Who will be the sacrifice?"

With a soft sigh and a grimace, the troll shook his head. "Fate will run its course in the end, my dear – whether it takes a day or a decade, fate will run its course." She was about to leave once more with a frustrated expression on her face when the troll called to her suddenly. "Ah, but there is something I've forgotten!"

Elsa wheeled around hopefully. "What is it?"

"You mentioned your sister, and how she now knows about your hidden powers."

She couldn't conceal her slight disappointment and the seemingly irrelevant comment, but nevertheless she tried to smile. "I suppose we shall have to find some way of getting around that," she muttered resolutely. "After all, she can never forget now that she knows."

The troll gave her a secretive smile. "Perhaps she can," he whispered as he reached his hand into a mossy pocket and withdrew it in a fist clenched around something. He revealed a tiny glass vial full of a clear blue liquid. "It's lucky that I still had a little of this in stock – it's a serum for memory loss, Your Highness. If you truly wish for her to forget about what has happened, this should do the trick; she won't recall a second of the past month."

He tried to push it into her outstretched hand, but she stepped back apprehensively at his words. _Do I really want Anna to forget everything that happened? _There was an opportunity here to rebuild a friendship that had been so heartbreakingly shattered all those years ago – a friendship that might blossom in the open air of honesty.

Seeing her hesitation and knowing that she was on a strict schedule, the troll merely opened her curled-up fist and delicately placed the vial in her palm. "I shall leave the decision to you, Princess," he remarked softly as he began to move backwards into the trees. "I must go – the others are waiting for me. Have a safe journey home."

Elsa might have responded to his farewell, but her mind was too busy with thoughts of her sister, and so she remained totally silent until she heard Dalli's voice. "Should we go?" he asked tentatively, clearing his throat with a cough. She hastily tucked the vial into the pocket of her cloak with Alred's diary in it.

"Yes," she replied, shaking away those worrying thoughts and turning to face the boat. Her arms and legs still ached from rowing to the dock, but she wasn't prepared to let the injured boy suffer by taking over. As she settled herself on to the wooden seat and started to untie the rope from the boat, she caught Dalli watching her carefully. "What is it?"

He blinked at her with a slight smile across his tired face. It took a few moments for him to choose the right words in his fatigued state, but eventually he opened his lips to respond. "What do we do now?"

Elsa swallowed hard, and with a quiet grunt of effort, she pulled the oars towards her and shifted the boat into open water. She waited until the rotation of a single oar had spun the boat back to face the shore of Arendelle before she considered the question. "Well," she began with some difficulty, "I suppose that we row back to the dock, and . . . and you'll get ready to go home."

"And after that?" Dalli's eyes searched hers intently. She instinctively looked away.

She increased her pace until she was rowing at full pelt, and beads of sweat began to drip from her forehead – they were racing against the sun to reach shore before the villagers were out in the streets, but she couldn't help but feel compelled to shorten the journey just to avoid the boy's impromptu inquisition. "We'll live separate lives, Dalli," she puffed breathlessly.

"That's not living," he retorted immediately.

She shot him a frustrated glance. Guiding their vessel towards a lifetime of separation was difficult enough without his input. "That's reality," she snapped. "That's what has to happen, and that's what is going to happen. Believe me, I hate it as much as you do." Her mind was overflowing with images of all those days, _all those years_, shut alone in her room that she would have to repeat without him, but she determinedly shoved them away.

They sat in silence for an uncomfortable expanse of time until they were so close to the shore of Arendelle that they could see a few figures silhouetted there. "I could still stay here, Elsa," Dalli murmured, watching her as her rowing pace slowed with exhaustion. "It's not too late for me to change everything."

She caught his eye and shot him a sorrowful glance behind the blurry layer of tears that she felt building over her eyes, though she had told herself firmly since the start of their journey that she _would not cry_ in front of him. "Everything has already changed," she whispered in response as they drew in closer to the docks. Her journey from the castle last night had been so dictated by her rage that she couldn't remember which dock she and Dalli had argued on, and so she simply aimed the rowboat for any of the empty spaces she could see.

He suddenly reached out and wrapped his hands around hers, holding them still so that the oars no longer moved around them. The boat began to slow down as it drifted closer to the shore. "If I can't change your mind, then at least let me tell you what's on mine." She froze for a moment or two of panic, before conceding to the warmth of his hands on hers and letting him speak.

The boy took a deep breath. "I will never forgive myself for lying to you, Elsa," he said, focusing on her gaze in the dawn light which beautifully illuminated her face. "However, I can't leave this kingdom without telling you this: before I met you, fate was just a word that was peddled in Groveston to describe a rare gift of the elite. Before I met you, fate didn't mean anything to me." He paused to brace himself for the next statement. "And then, when I finally saw your face, I realised: you are fate to me, Elsa. We were meant to be."

She opened her trembling lips to speak, trying desperately to stop her tears from flowing, but he shook his head.

"I understand that you don't want to hear this now but it's the truth, and if we never meet again, this will be my last opportunity to say it." He shot her a brief, melancholy smile that sent a sob shuddering through her body, though her tears remained unshed. "Of course, I know that we will meet again. Fate, if it is as true and beautiful as I now believe it to be, will bring us together."

Elsa sniffed hesitantly. "A-and if it doesn't?" she asked in a whisper. The boat was drifting ever closer to shore, and she would soon have to take up the oars again to guide them into the dock – though the very thought of dropping Dalli's hands made her physically whimper in distress.

Dalli saw her pained expression and tried to smile optimistically for her. "If, for some unknown cosmic reason, fate does not reunite us," he responded in as calm a voice as he could muster, "then I will never need to sleep again for the rest of my life, because I know that these days with you have been better than any dream I could ever have."

He gently untangled his hands from hers, withdrew his warm touch from her chilled skin, and shut his eyes to the slight autumnal breeze that was drifting over the fjord. With a final stroke of the oars, Elsa's shaking hands guided them back into a dock, and Dalli had regained enough strength by now to reach over the side of the rowboat and tie it up.

The voices of sleepy villagers were floating through the streets towards them, but Elsa calculated that there would be time for one final note in the symphony of their romance.

"Dalli?" she called out in a hoarse, tear-stricken voice.

He had been about to rise from the boat, but at the sound of his name, he immediately dropped back on to his seat. "Elsa?" he responded quietly, holding her gaze uncertainly.

She did not reply with a speech of her own, but expressed the thumping of her heart in a single movement: with trembling fingers, she moved forwards until her fingertips grazed the damp material of his drying cloak, and leaned in to kiss him.

It lasted for a few seconds – only as long as they had before they would be spotted, Elsa had calculated – but it was enough. And when they parted, as they had so dreaded to do, they left without a word but with the taste of a love they had barely known on their lips.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Hi again! I wanted to say another thank you for reading this story (and for all your lovely reviews, follows and favourites, as always!) and also give an apology - I had been posting a chapter a day when I started this story, but due to my workload from school, that rate of updates may have to go down to once every two days. We're on the final stretch - nine chapters left! - so please bear with me for the next week or so. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this chapter and thank you!


	22. Life Will Go On

By the time Elsa had washed away the salty smell of the fjord from her skin, morning had broken completely over Arendelle. There wasn't a single hint of the orange dawn left in the sky as she exited her bathroom, holding Alfred's diary in one hand and her damp cloak in the other; there was a considerable part of her that wanted to rush to her bedroom window and see if the huge Groveston ship had left the dock yet, but she told herself that such a sight would not help her. Knowing how far the distance was between herself and Dalli would make no difference to the pain of separation – whether they stood ten or ten thousand miles apart, the ache in her belly would remain.

Elsa moved quietly towards her wardrobe and opened it, surveying each outfit with a melancholy gaze. She brushed her fingers against the plush material of a few dresses, hoping to see them as she might have done a month ago, as beautiful but meaningless garments – however, each one was tinged with a painful memory now, like a lingering scent that she could not remove.

The long grey dress reminded her of the cavern by the fjord, where she had gone with Dalli on the day that they met. She had worn the soft yellow skirt on their first night of practise with her powers. The most painful to behold, though, was the deep blue gown – once her favourite – that still seemed to smell slightly of him. That was the dress she had worn on the night they visited the castle ballroom, and a single touch of it sent a sad shiver up her arm.

There was a gentle rapping on her door, and Elsa quickly threw the cloak into the wardrobe and shut it. She took a deep breath to collect herself, knowing that she must pretend to have just woken up, and walked over to the entrance.

She opened the door to the faces of her parents, who were waiting in the corridor. "Good morning, Elsa," her father said quietly, holding her eye somewhat conspiratorially for a few seconds before entering the room. The last time they had seen each other was the night before, and she recalled with an internal groan that she had told him all about Dalli.

Her mother followed the King, awkwardly pulling in a silver trolley laden with dishes from the corridor. "You haven't had breakfast yet, darling!" she exclaimed with concern, pulling the food over to her daughter's dining table. "I told you we should have come later," she muttered to her husband as the door shut behind her.

"We have to pack later," Elsa's father responded patiently. "Of course, we would have packed earlier usually, but we had to wave farewell to our visitors from Groveston." He sent a secretive glance to his daughter, whose skin had jolted at the sound of the final word.

"Have they left?" Elsa enquired instinctively, her eyes eagerly searching the gaze of her father for any hidden clues that he might reveal. It flashed through her mind that he may have sought Dalli out since last night, but his expression showed nothing except calm normality.

The man nodded. "They left an hour ago now – the King of Groveston sent you his luck." He paused for a brief moment, keeping Elsa's gaze. "I suppose he must mean luck with your studies."

Her mother laid out the breakfast trays on the dining table and organised her daughter's meal, seemingly taking some delight in the opportunity to care for Elsa again. "That was sweet of him," she commented briskly in a light tone as if she had not been truly listening to her husband at all. "Now, eat up, darling! You look famished."

It was true that Elsa was beginning to feel pangs of hunger in her empty stomach, but the thought of Dalli drifting futher away from her with each passing second on the fjord was enough to steal away her appetite. "I will in a moment," she muttered quietly to her mother as she took a seat at the dining table.

Her father spotted Alfred's diary, which Elsa had thrown on to her bed after leaving the bathroom, and picked it up to examine it. She hoped that he would not feel the slight dampness of its cover after its long night of stormy travel. "Have you finished it yet?" he asked as he flipped through the pages. "You know, once you've read this one, there are plenty more in your mother's library."

Elsa shook her head slowly. "I have a few more pages left to read," she mumbled through a mouthful of scrambled eggs, which she had forced into her mouth under her mother's expectant gaze. "Would you mind if I went to pick up a few more this week, Mother?"

"Of course I wouldn't – although I won't be here to know if you do," her mother remarked with a slight chuckle. "We must go and pack for the journey to Renadelle if we want to leave by sunset. I wish you and Anna could come, my darling – I've heard that the beaches there are practically tropical!"

"I don't think I would suit a tropical beach," Elsa lamented in a sigh as a tendril of ice crept along the metallic handle of her fork. She swallowed another mouthful of the food laboriously before looking up to meet the eyes of her mother. "Do you have to go?"

Her mother took one look at her husband and exhaled slowly. "We're sorry to leave you here, Elsa, but we have promises to keep in Renadelle that simply cannot be dealt with through letters alone," she said as she shook her head. "But we'll be back before you know it! Plus, after this trip, we'll have no more foreign arrangements for the rest of the year."

"We had better leave you to your breakfast," her father added as he placed the diary back on her bed and moved over to his daughter. "Well, goodbye, Elsa." He placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it comfortingly. "We'll see you soon."

"Goodbye," Elsa muttered in response as they moved towards the door. The prophecy of the trolls suddenly burst into her head in a flash of memory, and the word 'sacrifice' burned in her mind. "Be safe!" she called out to them quickly. "Take extra care on the trip! You can never be too cautious!"

Her mother simply laughed and turned away, while her father opened the door for them to leave. Just before he closed it behind him with a word of farewell, he turned back to his daughter swiftly. "Oh, and Elsa?" he called.

"Yes, Father?" she replied as she looked up.

He lowered his voice to a quiet whisper so his wife would not hear him. "Life will go on," he uttered. "Whatever you're feeling now is only temporary – no matter what happens, no matter how much you miss that friend of yours, life will always go on." With that, he dipped his head out of the door, and left her in the silence of an empty room.

* * *

The awkward shape of the empty vial was beginning to dig into her clenched fist as Elsa waited in the corridor. Her gloved hands were wrapped around the edges of a silver tea tray, and she tensed her muscles desperately as a thin sheet of ice began to spread across its surface – sitting on the tray were what appeared to be two precariously-overfilled mugs of hot chocolate, but which were, in fact, so much more important than just that.

The door in front of her opened up to reveal Anna, who was already dressed in her nightgown with her hair tied back into a long plait for the night. The corridor was dark but her room was warm with the light of hundreds of candles, and when she saw her sister's face illuminated in the darkness, she let out an excited squeal. "Elsa!" she exclaimed, beckoning the older girl in. "You came!"

"Hello," her sister responded somewhat sheepishly – as she passed the waste basket on her way into the room, she quickly flexed her left hand so that the empty vial would drop into it. She felt a flourish of guilt in her belly about what she was about to do, but it was not enough to make her leave – Alfred's words were in her mind, and duty was in her heart. This was what she had to do to protect her sister. "I'm sorry that I couldn't come last night."

"Oh, that's alright! I didn't wait up or anything," Anna lied light-heartedly. She quickly shut the door and indicated for her sister to go over to the bed, where there were a few textbooks open to various complex diagrams. "I was just trying to finish off some homework, but you can move it – just sit down anywhere."

Elsa swept the books away and perched carefully on the edge of the double bed, sliding the silver tray on to the other side of it. She positioned it carefully so that the more ornate mug, decorated with detailed depictions of spring blooms, was furthest from her – the liquids in the two mugs were barely distinguishable from each other, but she was distinctly aware that the ornate mug contained the memory loss potion of the trolls.

Her sister hurried over excitedly, and bounced on to the bed with such force that it almost sent the two drinks flying across the room. "Careful!" Elsa gasped, perhaps a little too quickly, as she jerked forwards to save the mugs.

"Sorry," Anna muttered quickly as she rearranged herself on the bed. She took a moment of stillness to simply take in the image of her sister and sigh in contentment. "You know, I thought you hated me for so long," she admitted with an embarrassed giggle. "I spent so long wondering what I'd done wrong."

Elsa sighed, giving her sister a sympathetic smile. She stretched out her hand to grab her own, less detailed mug in the hope of enticing her sister to do the same with hers. "You didn't do anything," she said softly, pressing the mug to her lips and praying that her powers would not express her anxiety by freezing the liquid in it. "It was my fault. I just wanted to keep you safe."

Anna followed her sister's lead and reached for her own mug. The sudden spike in Elsa's nerves sent a shot of ice racing up her sleeve, but she tried to ignore it and focus on the younger girl. "You don't have to keep me safe anymore, Elsa. Now I know! Things can be just like they were when we were children." She raised the mug to her lips and took a long, deep drink.

"I'd love that," Elsa whispered. Her sister swallowed and, though Elsa was expecting an immediate reaction, simply let out a small murmur of enjoyment. "I'd love to be sisters again."

"We'll always be sisters!" Anna exclaimed with a laugh. The wonderfully colourful sound of her laughter, that was so familiar and so severely missed by Elsa, faded into a yawn. "We may not have spoken for a while, but we've still got the same blood."

The younger girl slowly leaned backwards to rest her neck against the headboard of the bed, shutting her eyes sleepily. "Tired?" Elsa asked tentatively, wondering if this was the effect of the troll's potion. To keep up the pretence of her visiting Anna's room for an innocent midnight meeting, she took another sip of her hot chocolate.

"A little," Anna murmured, drinking again from her mug. "I guess I'm just happy." She let out a quiet sigh of pleasure.

Elsa smiled, and was tempted to shift closer to the girl – she had so sorely missed their closeness as children – but was stopped by her awareness of her powers. Whatever control she had gained over them with Dalli seemed to be quickly fading from her hands now, and she had been particularly meticulous with her preparations before leaving her room that night, choosing extra-thick gloves to wear. "If it was entirely up to me, I'd never have let this happen, Anna," the girl whispered remorsefully.

The younger sister was gradually drifting into a calm sleep, but she retained enough energy to smirk at her sister's words. "Well, now it's up to me – and I will never let this happen again." Her head began to slide downwards towards the pillow as she slowly lost consciousness. "I told you in the cavern, and I'll tell you again now, Elsa: for as long as I live, I will remember the years we spent apart, and I will not let it happen again."

Elsa reached out and gently took the tilted mug from Anna's loosening grip, trying desperately to remain impartial to her sister's voice though each word was breaking her heart. "I'm sure you will," she murmured softly as her sister's breathing began to slow with sleep.

"Elsa?" her sister pushed out with her last moment of consciousness.

The older girl inspected her face carefully. "Yes, Anna?"

"Do you want to build a snowman?"

Elsa's eyes filled up with tears and she opened her mouth to respond, but her sister had already fallen asleep, and the years spent apart began all over again.


	23. That Rolling Tide

Perhaps her sleeping pattern had been horribly corrupted by that long night with the trolls, or perhaps her mind was just struggling to adjust to life after Dalli; whatever it was that was keeping her awake, Elsa hadn't been able to sleep past dawn for six days. Her eyes were bleary with fatigue as she wearily dragged the duvet away from her legs, pushing herself out of the bed with considerable effort. The room was alive with the brilliant orange of a cold dawn, and for a few moments she stood in front of her bedroom window and inspected the fjord.

She told herself that she wasn't looking for anything in particular, but her eyes still searched the horizon for any sign of an approaching ship. _He can't come back now, _she told herself firmly, though the pang of her heart that accompanied the thought sent a spike of sorrowful ice across the windowpane.

Despite the obstructing frost, she could see a few fishermen on the shore, untying their nets for the day's work and pulling on their huge protective overalls. She could have sworn that she heard them faintly shouting to each other in their jovial sing-song voices, although she had often been fooled by the whistling wind against the window frame into thinking such things before.

There was a gentle knock on the door, and Elsa turned away from the window with a certain resigned grace – the silhouette of a huge Groveston ship against the rising sun would have sent her heart soaring, but she told herself that it was childish to be disappointed about something that was not even a possibility. "Come in, Abeline," she murmured in a monotonous tone.

She considered it an act of kindness that her father had not changed the staff recently, so that she had the opportunity to befriend the kindly servant who brought up her meals. The door creaked open and a silver tray was pushed in slowly by the plump woman, eyes gleaming with cheer. "Good morning, Your Highness!" she said warmly. "You told me that you were waking up earlier and earlier these days, and so I thought I'd bring in your breakfast ahead of time."

"That was very considerate of you," Elsa responded in as genial a tone as she could muster – she had lived a week in a painfully familiar state of solitude, and yet Dalli's face still plagued her mind for each minute of the day, making interaction with others seem impossible. "I hope it didn't cause you any trouble."

"Nonsense, Princess!" the woman replied with a bubbling laugh. She wheeled the tray further into the room and carefully laid out an arrangement of plates on the dining table; with another slight giggle, she looked up and winked at the girl. "Anyway, it saved me from having to do the cleaning with the others."

Elsa gave a weak chuckle at the servant's words, inspecting the meal with suspicious eyes. The beautiful smell was enough to entice her over to the table, but her belly had recently been growing averse to food, and so she quietly concealed a sickened gag at the sight of the packed plates.

Abeline gave her a concerned frown. "Are you alright, Your Highness?" she enquired softly. "If you'd like something different, I'd be quite happy to go and have it made for you. Don't feel obliged to eat it just because I'm here."

"No, no," the princess forced out, though she felt increasingly ill with each glance she took of the piled-up food. "I . . . I don't think I feel quite up to eating at the moment, that's all."

The servant wore a comforting smile as she covered the dishes again. "I'll come back later," she resolved with a hint of pity in her jolly tone. "Would you like me to send up the doctor? I've heard that there's been an awful stomach illness going around Arendelle recently. I realise you teenagers are resilient when it comes to winter bugs, but your parents would really want me to call the doctor."

Elsa shook her head laboriously, and flopped down on to her bed looking somewhat defeated. She had been so adamant in Dalli's presence that their lives would go on normally without each other, and yet she seemed to have become walking proof that it was never that simple. "It's not that," she sighed wearily.

"Perhaps you should get some fresh air," Abeline suggested as she loaded the full plates back on to their silver trolley. "I've been told that a brisk walk along the fjord on a winter morning can instantly brighten the spirits. There's even supposed to be a little cavern right out in front of the water that –"

Just the sound of the place made Elsa feel a sudden wave of nausea in her stomach. "Thank you, Abeline," she spluttered quickly, "but it's nothing to do with that. I just can't imagine eating right now."

There was a moment of silence after her sudden outburst that filled the room with unspoken questions, until the servant cautiously lowered herself on to a dining chair, aware that she was breaking the most fundamental rules of her employment. "Elsa?" she murmured in a nervous tone. "I realise that I may not be the first person you would turn to in a time of crisis, but it must get pretty lonely up here when it's just you on your own. If you ever need to talk to anybody, I'm here."

The princess gently rested her head in the palms of her hands for a moment, trying to rub the exhaustion from her eyes and failing. "Thank you for the generous offer," she said in stilted response, almost as if reading from a well-learnt mental script. "However, I must refuse."

"Why?" Abeline's question was fast and instantaneous, and the hurried hand that she raised to her mouth after the words escaped suggested that she had not intended their release. She cleared her throat swiftly to clarify, "I mean, what's holding you back from talking to me, Your Highness?"

Elsa shook her head sadly as a few spiky tendrils of ice crept down the material of her sleeves, working their way down her creased dress and on to the carpet. A month ago, her mind may have been preoccupied with trying to stop Abeline from seeing those tendrils of ice, but she had greater issues to cloud her head now. "Everything," she sighed in defeat. "Nothing is ever simple anymore."

The servant shot her a bittersweet smile. "Was it ever simple in the first place?" she asked softly, eyes searching Elsa's for any sign of comfort.

"It was definitely easier than this," the princess groaned in desperation as she drew her knees up to her chin on the bed and wrapped her arms around them. It was a position she had once known well, in the many gloomy days and nights she had seen in complete solitude – she used to curl up like this and wait for hours, sometimes whole nights, until her sorrow subsided. "I just don't know where to go from this point. I feel lost."

Abeline gave a humourless snort of recognition. "I used to say that too when I was your age," she sighed. She was not an old woman, but the slight creases of frequent laughter that appeared in maturity were beginning to creep from the edges of her laughing eyes. Elsa mentally guessed that she was yet to hit her fortieth birthday. "I used to fall in love over and over again, and each time it ended, I would say that I felt lost in this big world."

Elsa's attention piqued at the sound of 'love', though she determinedly refused to apply it to Dalli's face in fear of falling into a deeper pain than the one she was currently wallowing in. "So what did you do?" she asked quietly, peeking at the servant from behind her knees. "How did you move on from that?"

The woman shot her a vaguely sympathetic look, though the girl was still anxiously withholding the source of her anguish. "Time," she uttered simply. "Time won't stop you from thinking about it and time won't stop you from hurting every time you do - but in a few weeks, or a few months, or a few years even, that hurt will be a little less than it was before. Eventually, you'll forget that your heart was even broken, because somebody else will have fixed it for you."

The princess took in the words and buried her head again. "What if it wasn't just a flame that died?" she mumbled, as her voice was muffled by the material of her dress. "What if it was something bigger, like fate?" She paused and took a deep, calming breath. "What if this person was supposed to spend all that time with you, and you let them sail away?"

Abeline shut her eyes and smiled, though she knew the girl couldn't see her. "To sail away can be a funny thing, Your Highness," she said in a tone that barely breached a whisper. "The sea can be cruel and unforgiving – it can carry away pieces of your heart and never return them. But it is also constant, Elsa: what the sea steals from us, it tends to throw back in equal measure. We may not get back precisely what we lost, but like life itself, the tide will never take more than it gives. If whoever has taken your heart ran away with it over the sea, then one day, on that rolling tide, your heart will wash up on the shore again and the cycle will go on."

At that moment, the door burst open, and the smartly-dressed butler stumbled into the room. The interruption sent Elsa's powers into a sudden frenzy, and the frost that had been lazily extending across her bedroom floor abruptly spiked outwards and covered the whole carpet. Abeline rose up immediately, aware that she had been acting out of line with her duties by sitting in her employer's seat.

"Your Highness," the butler spluttered, chest heaving as he gasped for breath. The floor had rapidly frosted over around him, but whatever was troubling him made him ignore the ice completely. "I mean, Your Majesty," he corrected swiftly.

Elsa jumped to her feet and held out her hands instinctively, as if in preparation to use her powers somehow. "What is it?" she asked tentatively. A feeling of cold, black dread began to creep into her empty stomach.

The butler swallowed, cast a worried glance at Abeline, and gathered himself up in the hope of gaining some composure. "I'm afraid to announce that the King and Queen have been lost at sea, Your Majesty," he announced in as steady a voice he could rouse from his battered lungs. "You are to be the Queen of Arendelle."


	24. Difficult To Believe

Elsa couldn't help but feel a sense of time repeating itself as she slung the hood of her cloak over her face. Its central purpose was to guard her features from the onslaught of the rain outside, but it also acted as a shield from any judging looks; if any inquisitive servant peered underneath the hood now, they would see her red, swelled features from her mourning, and she wanted nobody's pity tonight.

The corridors in the servants' quarters were luckily void of people, though she hurried swiftly to the exit when she heard a door opening behind her and two female voices emerging into the space. She had often struggled with the stiff brass door that led out to the back of the castle, but it seemed that her pent-up fury was serving her well in a certain respect, as an almighty push from her shoulder forced the door open in one go and she burst out into the wilderness.

Elsa was not often superstitious, but the similarities between this night and the night she had struck Dalli were frightening; again, a vicious winter storm had rolled into Arendelle and had beaten the streets into desertion as all the villagers hid indoors. The sea was rocking and the defenceless little fishing boats that were tied to the docks were bobbing up and down on the violent waves, though she had the fortune of avoiding such a vessel tonight. In her pocket was the familiar shape of a concealed diary – although this one did not belong to Alfred.

She paused for a moment to take in the storm before hurrying down the craggy path towards the docks. The last time she had muddied her shoes on this unstable path was when she rushed to confront Dalli about his lies, but this was not the memory that dominated her thoughts: the one vivid recollection that was prominent above all the rest was her mother, young and beautiful and _living_, guiding her two daughters down towards the sea.

Just the image of her kind face and their childhood adventures sent Elsa into a momentary stupor of mourning all over again. Tears formed in her eyes once again, though the tender flesh of her face was still stinging and raw from her last emotional outburst, but she blinked them away determinedly. In three years, she would be Queen of Arendelle, and she was certain that a monarch of this proud kingdom would not ascend to the throne with any unsolved disputes from her past.

The shore seemed somehow further away now than it was in the last storm – perhaps then her path had been blinded by anger. Elsa strode carefully over assorted pebbles and miniature landslides, making an unconscious attempt to preserve the cloak on her back as it was one of her only physical memories of Dalli. When she had snuck out of her room that evening – a habit she had fallen into somehow and that she intended to stop soon – her intention had been to do with this what she was going to do with the diary, but the last few scraps of tender sentimentality for the boy were now convincing her to reconsider.

At last, her feet touched the wood of the dock on which she was sure she had met Dalli last time. Yes, the creaking of the wooden boards sounded familiar, and she remembered the gloomy landscape she had desperately examined all those nights ago. Standing in the same place brought a whole new wave of painful emotions to her aching heart, but she silently repeated Alfred's motto in the hope of consoling herself: _duty must come above all. _This was her duty. If she told herself that enough times, she hoped she may begin to believe it.

It took some effort to pull the little diary from its snug pocket in her cloak – the resistance felt somewhat symbolic of her reluctance to let it go, although she pushed such foolish ideas out of her mind and forced herself to think pragmatically about her situation – but when it finally dislodged itself, it burst open in the wind. She watched as pages and pages of her handwritten entries danced in front of her, and though the book remained held together by its firm binding, the cold rain was beginning to soil the paper.

_This was Dalli's birthday gift to me, which I found to be –_

The page flipped immediately forwards in the howling wind.

_After we practised tonight I felt as if I could finally do what I've always –_

Another page was almost ripped from the book's spine.

_Wow. I'd only ever read about first kisses but this one was –_

That tiny snippet of her own excited handwriting sent a small shiver down her spine, but the elements wanted Elsa to read no more of it.

_The trolls said that I couldn't know who the sacrifice would be but that Dalli would live now, which makes me –_

Her stomach dropped at the words on the page, until the wind had finally died down enough for her to scan through her final entry. It pained her to read it, but she couldn't help herself. It was almost as if she was forcing herself to relive the tragedy of their parting just so that she could feel one final, sweet thrill from the romance that preceded it.

_It has been three days since Dalli left, and this little book is full up of everything I thought I would never have – and now, everything I sorely miss. I still think about him so often that I can hardly think about anything else. I wonder if his work is fulfilling and whether he enjoys his occupation. I wonder if he is going to set off on another journey to another distant land soon. I wonder if he ever thinks about me. I hope he does._

Elsa grimaced, and held the page open to examine it sorrowfully. On these pages were the scribbled accounts of a life that felt so different to the life she led now – she was reading the words of an Elsa that had strayed from her room and truly _lived_ for a few sweet weeks. There was a part of her that mourned the loss of this girl, the rebellious spirit that she had once possessed, but the thought of Alfred was enough to make her expel these thoughts from her mind with stubborn firmness. _Duty must come above all._

She edged ever closer to the edge of the dock, and peered into the choppy black waters uncertainly. Her reflection was indistinguishable from the glow of the moon in the shining water, and she felt a small hint of gladness in her broken heart – she did not want to see what it looked like to feel like this. With a deep breath, she stretched out the arm holding her diary, and extended it over the raging sea.

Just as her fingers were about to let go of the book's frayed edge, its front cover snapped open and revealed to her the heavily-inked phrase that was opposite her first page of writing. She had heard it once or twice coming from Dalli's lips and had admired it so much that she had copied it out into her diary, going over it in thick black ink whenever she needed reassurance.

_"THE COLD NEVER BOTHERED ME ANYWAY"_. These were the stylised words etched into the inside cover of her diary, and her heart began to ache so violently as she read them that she feared it may have actually broken in its cage.

"Is this punishment for leaving my room?" Elsa screeched out, knowing somewhat comfortingly that the wind was stealing most of her volume and keeping her words from waking the villagers. She withdrew the diary from its precarious position over the sea, and held it tightly to her chest. She didn't know who she was screaming at or why, but it didn't matter. Trivial things like that never seemed to matter now, when compared to the greater losses she had seen. "Are you trying to tell me that I made one mistake, and now I have to pay for it for the rest of my life?"

She sniffled, trying to hold back tears, before staring up searchingly at the cluster of stars overhead. "Are you punishing me by taking my parents?" she asked in a weaker voice that began to tremble slightly. "If that's what you're doing, fate, then you've got it all wrong. They didn't do anything! It was me! Why did you have to take them?"

A spike of clear ice jutted up suddenly from the sea, like a glacier being propelled upwards from the depths. She gasped and leapt back, clutching the diary closer to her chest. Another spike sprung up to her left, and another further out into the fjord – was this an act of fate too? Would this strange, nonsensical entity try to take her too, just as it had taken the people that she loved? "Go on!" she exclaimed into the wind furiously. "You might as well take me, too! It's not like I have anything else to live for now!"

It was then that she noticed the slight blue glow emanating from her fingertips. Were those products of her _powers_? "What's going on?" she asked in a concerned whimper, watching as the light glow from her hands gradually started to fade. Around her, though she was too busy inspecting her fingers to notice, the spiked glaciers began to slip back down into the water.

Elsa took a deep, stilted breath and gently lowered her hands back to her sides. "My powers have never done that before," she whispered with a frown. After recovering her shaken nerve, she realised sadly that this was only another chapter for her mental list of reasons why she could no longer communicate with Anna – now that her sister had forgotten all about her powers, she had to be protected. If the ice from her hands was beginning to turn into sharp, threatening pikes instead of gentle sprinklings of frost, she could not risk reintroducing her sister to her powers; the thought only made her chest ache more, but this was the sad truth. She tried to tell herself quietly that this had to be the dark stretch of pointless time before the dawn, when all this mourning and hurt would fade away and leave her ready to begin again. For some reason, that was difficult to believe.

"I was told that whatever you take, you give back," Elsa muttered, turning her attention to the rocking sea. The phrase reminded her of the butler's announcement of her parents' death, and stinging tears immediately sprung to her eyes again, but she choked them back determinedly. "If that's true, then I suppose you should have everything – but I hope that you will bring me something precious in return for this. It's special."

And with those final words, she lifted her arm slightly and feebly tossed her worn diary into the fjord. Elsa watched with tearful eyes as the pretty material sunk further and further into the black, before it had disappeared completely, and she was staring at an empty expanse of sea.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Hi again guys! Another quick note to say how much I appreciate your continuing support. As always, I have to apologise for my school commitments, which have kept me from updating as often as I would like. The story seems pretty bleak at the moment, but do stick with it - there's only a little way left to go, and I promise that if you've liked it so far, you won't want to miss the ending! :) As always, thank you so much for your reviews, follows and favourites. They never fail to put a smile on my face. Thanks, and bye!


	25. Almost Haunted

Despite her bones aching with fatigue, Elsa found it difficult to sleep that night after returning from the docks. She had tossed and turned restlessly in her plush bedding, trying to expel a thousand troubling memories from her mind, until she could stand it no longer and got up. She suspected that dawn was yet to break over Arendelle, but she did not want to see another day begin with that bright orange reminder of her time with Dalli, and so she kept the curtains of her bedroom closed as she prepared for the day.

Elsa caught a glance of her desk from the corner of her eye, and grimaced in sudden discomfort. The wooden surface of the desk could not be seen for all the cards and letters on it – lying on top, miserably waiting for her attention, were a full pad of paper and a fountain pen. According to the servants, her sister was still wrought with grief for their parents, and so it was up to her to respond to every message of condolence that had been sent to the family.

That task could not be done in her slightly jittery state of sleeplessness, however, and so she perched patiently on the edge of her bed and tried to plan her day. She had no distinct royal duties as her father's advisers were set to take over the running of the kingdom until she came of age to take the throne, but they had invited her input; this gave her plenty to think about, but nothing that was going to entice her from her comfortable room.

Elsa felt a pang of sorrow deep in her belly as she thought of her parents, but carefully suppressed it, following a thorough technique that she had developed as a child on all those lonely days. She vaguely considered the possibility of allowing herself to grieve for them, but her raw emotions had hardened into a numb state of withdrawal, and that was serving her too well to discard it now. She had a duty to her kingdom, after all.

Her eyes flicked across her room to land on the only object on her dining table. It was the all-too-familiar form of Alfred's diary, which she had read and reread, hoping to soak up all of its condensed wisdom. Knowing the fate of her lost relative Sophia added a certain tinge of melancholia to each entry but she still looked to it in times of crisis. This, she supposed, qualified a time of crisis.

There were still lessons that she had yet to learn from that book, but inspecting its surface reminded her of a different task that she could occupy herself with on that day: if she could fight the onslaught of painful memories at the thought of her mother, she might be able to reach the library and collect the other editions of Alfred's diary.

* * *

The Queen's Library, as it had been officially renamed a decade ago, was as glorious as ever. In the morning light it was lit up like a beacon, with sunbeams streaming in from the open windows and a slight winter chill drifting through the aisles. Each shelf had a gilded vein of sparkling gold running along its edge, carefully shaped into a pattern to represent the section of the library it was in – Elsa ran her fingers delicately along the intricate little leaves in the Nature area, marvelling at the room's ingenious architecture.

Despite its beauty, her mother's library was desperately empty somehow – it felt almost haunted in the absence of her mother. She winced as she recalled running up and down the rows and rows of books with her sister, trying to find a specific title from the collection's massive index. She remembered her father, bursting in with some long-forgotten piece of good news to tell his wife. She remembered happiness – a happiness that felt so horribly mistaken in memory, as if they were naive to think it might last forever.

Elsa's mind was racing with these images from her past but she stayed silent, knowing that it was vital for her powers to remain hidden from now on. After those unnervingly sharp spikes of ice – apparently products of her powers, though she had never seen such ferocity coming unwillingly from her hands before - had sprung up from the fjord yesterday, she had resolved to stay as distant from others as possible; before leaving for the library, she had even rejected the customary conversation with Abeline that she had come to value so much each morning, stating that she was busy. The friendly servant was only trying to be helpful, Elsa knew, but she too had to be protected from potential danger.

At last, she found the oak bookcase of the library that was dedicated to her family history, where each shelf was decorated with tiny depictions of crowns and sceptres. The walls were lined with names that were vaguely familiar to her – she was sure that the huge velvet book about ice-picking in the mountains had been written by a distant uncle of hers, and a thin account of a bloody war definitely belonged to her famously war-hungry grandfather, but she wasn't looking for any of those documents. She was looking for the two packed shelves of Alfred's diaries, all neatly dated and ordered by the Keeper of the Library, and when she saw them her heart gave a small jump of excitement.

A thin trickle of white ice began to creep through the gilded gold veins of the bookshelves, but Elsa was too busy carrying her stack of books to a nearby table to notice. She had chosen the ten diaries that followed on from the one she had read, and as she dumped them with a groan of effort on to the long mahogany reading table in the centre of the room, she spotted that the accounts would take her up to 1935.

Elsa took a long, deep breath before reaching for the book labelled 'June – December 1923'. It was leather-bound, just like its predecessor, but its edges were a little less frayed and the printed words on its cover were in a slightly more legible font. As she flipped it open and drew in the familiar smell of age and her great-grandfather's distinctive scent, her powers began to discreetly dominate the rest of the library – she was too consumed by her reading to realise that the windows were frosting over above her, and the great oak columns of the building were turning white with ice.

It was only a few minutes later, when the grand doors of the library suddenly creaked open behind her, that she realised what her powers had done. With a jump, she leapt away from the table and turned to face whoever was entering, and gave a small gasp as she saw the whitewashed decor of the room. Every shelf, every book, every window had turned to glittering ivory with the spread of ice and when she looked down cautiously at her hands, she spotted the eerie blue glow once more. "What's happening?" she asked in a terrified whisper.

"I beg your pardon, Your Highness?" murmured the small butler in a nervous voice, peering through the gap between the doors.

Elsa's head whipped up to inspect him, and when she saw that she recognised his face, her muscles relaxed slightly. She watched him gradually take in the sight of the radically different library and silently thanked him for his lack of reaction – he looked momentarily shocked, but years of royal service had taught him to conceal such emotions and so he collected himself carefully and shot her a look of calm nonchalance. "Nothing," Elsa sighed in response.

The butler pushed the door open a little more, and the earthy smell of nature flooded into the room. "I'm sorry to bother you, Your Highness, but you were not in your room and your breakfast servant suggested that you might be here."

"Here I am," Elsa murmured, watching him with her hands kept firmly behind her back – her powers were growing more and more disobedient with each day, and she wanted to take every precaution possible to stop them from flaring up again. "What do you need?"

"You have a guest," the butler replied somewhat anxiously. "I told him that you were busy for the foreseeable future, but he insisted to come in – he told me that you would know him."

Elsa's eyes widened. There was only one 'he' that she could think of. _Could it be?_ Dalli's face flashed into her mind just as vividly as if he was in front of her already, and her heart soared instinctively at the thought of seeing him again. Her fingers twitched excitedly at the thought of his skin, and his voice, and his smell – her arms were already rising by her sides, anticipating the hug that she was sure he would wrap her up in as soon as he saw her. "Yes?" she pushed out in a short breath.

"He told me that he was sent by the trolls," the butler explained, pushing the door so that it rolled open to reveal two figures silhouetted against the morning sun. One was tall and broad - not like Dalli at all - while the other was quite stout with an extraordinary hairstyle. No, that wasn't a hairstyle – were those . . . _antlers?_

_A reindeer?_

"Your Highness," the butler announced with some relief, "allow me to present to you, Kristoff and Sven!"

* * *

**Author's Note:** Once again, sorry for the late update and for this chapter being short/hurried. I am still trying to update as frequently as possible, and I always read your lovely reviews - thank you for your encouragement! With any luck, I'll get some more free time soon, although a lot of my deadlines are in February so it's a bit of a push. Anyway, thank you for reading and supporting the story, and please keep reading! :) Oh, and before I go - yep, Kristoff and Sven are making a surprise appearance! Tee hee. I couldn't resist! ;)


	26. The Frosted Library

Kristoff surveyed the library with some trepidation – the shock of the interruption had sent Elsa's powers into a frenzy, and every visible surface was now coated with twinkling frost. It might have looked beautiful to her if her mind was not so preoccupied with who this stranger was, and why he was in her library.

"Are you Kristoff or Sven?" she stammered, carefully removing her hands from behind her back and holding them out in front of her, as if preparing to defend herself. "What are you doing here?"

The tall blond snorted, tugged his fur jacket tighter around himself and shot her a humourless half-smile. "I'm Kristoff – this is Sven," he sighed in response, indicating towards the large beast beside him with his free hand. In his other hand, he was clutching a crumpled yellow scrap of parchment that seemed to be dotted with black patches. "I'm just here to give you a message from the trolls, Your . . . Highness." The words did not slip easily from his mouth, as if it caused him some discomfort to utter them.

Elsa surveyed his clenched fist suspiciously, and after a few moments she held out her hand. "Alright," she murmured uncertainly. It took her another few seconds to think of something more diplomatic to add. "I mean, I wouldn't want to keep you from your travels. You look as if you've come a long way already."

Kristoff snorted indignantly. "Thanks," he chuckled.

"No, not like that!" Elsa spluttered quickly, noticing her own mistake. "I mean, you look well-travelled. Who else have you delivered to today?" She swiped one hand anxiously against her forehead, rearranging a stray strand of blonde hair and casting constant worried glances at the frosted library around her. The morning was cool and she was quite sure that the grass around the castle would be edged with white frost, but the day was not so cold as to freeze an entire room, and she had a feeling that he knew that.

"I'm not a messenger," Kristoff replied curtly, moving forwards to place the scrap of parchment into her outstretched hand with such abruptness that she jumped slightly at his touch. "I'm just . . . I'm something of a friend to the trolls. It's difficult to explain."

Elsa began to carefully unfurl the paper before quickly crumpling it up once more and meeting his eye. "Have you read this?" she asked cautiously. Without reading it, she knew that the message would be quite sensitive and somehow related to her powers – and if anybody found out about her powers now, her future would be dashed like glass over a rocky shore.

The boy smiled and shook his head – he walked and acted like a man, but upon closer inspection, Elsa could see the delicate blemishes of youth on his face and realised that he could not be beyond his teenage years. "No," he replied. "The trolls just told me to bring it to the castle – and I've got to say, this place doesn't look how I imagined." He cast a long, pondering look at their frozen surroundings.

Elsa forced a smirk. "No, I suppose not," she responded quickly, itching to read the message but aware that she would not be able to react to it properly in his presence. If the servant who had brought the boy in was still lingering by the door, as the staff sometimes did with the intent of overhearing royal gossip, she might have been able to rely on him for the boy's swift escort out – however, as she peered carefully around his well-built frame, she saw that the servant was gone.

Kristoff's voice broke her train of thought. "The architecture's incredible in here," he sighed, examining each frosted wooden panel. "The ice looks so real. I'd heard that this place looked pretty good, but I thought it would all be antique and dusty – these designs look like they were made yesterday!"

Her smile froze into a set expression of veiled panic. _Can I pretend that this is just a design feature? Hasn't he noticed that this is all real? _"Th-that's why it's called the Frosted Library," she stammered after a few moments. She paused for a second and frowned at the icy walls. "I don't like it myself – if I had it my way, it would all be gone in a second." The thought of attempting Dalli's technique of reigning in her powers was tempting – though even thinking of him now sent a sharp pike of pain through her fragile heart – but she resisted it. Now she had created the pretence, she had to maintain it in Kristoff's presence.

He scoffed at her with a scowl. "You're crazy!" he spluttered out as he ran one hand against a nearby bookshelf, his fingertips leaving tiny darkened patches in the fresh frost. "It even feels cold! You don't realise how lucky you are. I'd give up everything to have a library like this, covered in snow and ice . . ."

"I wouldn't advise it," Elsa snapped, losing her temper slightly. "This . . . this particular design feature is a difficult one to control. It looks beautiful now, but you haven't seen it when it goes wrong – it can bring on all sorts of trouble."

"I wouldn't mind that," Kristoff insisted in a breath. "I know plenty of people who could put up with a slightly faulty system if they could sit in a room like this. Look!" he exclaimed as a few flecks of snow began to drift down towards the floor. "It's even snowing!" He shot her a mischievous look. "Do you want to build a snowman?"

Elsa's stomach jolted in shock. "What?" she retorted sharply. A sudden memory of Anna's face as she drifted into a forgetful sleep a few nights ago burst into the girl's mind, and she tried desperately to shake it away.

"Relax," the boy laughed calmly, holding out an upturned hand to let the flakes fall into his palm. Sven intrepidly stuck out his tongue and shivered in excitement as he tasted the snow. "We have to get back to the mountains anyway – I guess we can't get enough of the cold weather."

She smirked, anxious to send them on their way. "You should meet my sister," she sighed. "You remind me a little of her." Her heart ached for the sight of Anna's youthful face, for just a glimpse of her excitable manner. _No_, she told herself firmly. _Duty above all. Duty above all. _That trusted family mantra of hers seemed to grow weaker and weaker by the day.

"Maybe I will," Kristoff replied, resting a comforting hand on Sven's neck and tickling his fur affectionately. The beast gave a quiet snort of pleasure. "Maybe I won't – it's not every day that I have to come up to the castle. I've heard that your parents keep the doors locked up tight now."

Elsa jerked her head back in surprise. "M-my parents?" she spluttered. Their faces flashed into her mind like a lit flame and she flinched with discomfort. "What about my parents?"

Kristoff blinked, clearly unaware of his mistake. "I was told by a few tribesmen recently that they don't allow visitors into the castle anymore," he repeated uncertainly. "Of course, I've never trusted tribesmen – I'm sure your parents have their reasons . . ."

"My parents are dead." The words sounded so wrong and disjointed coming from her lips that she coughed half-heartedly after them. However, they were the truth, and it was inevitable that she would have to admit it to somebody. She wanted to add something that might numb the blunt edge of that statement, but her flustered mind offered her nothing; she simply stood in uncomfortable silence in front of him, inspecting Kristoff's face for any sign of reaction.

The boy's eyebrows rose up and he opened his mouth to respond instinctively, but shut it again before his lips could betray him with a callous comment. "I'm sorry," he eventually forced out. "I didn't realise that they had passed."

Elsa swallowed and tried to wear a face of brave nonchalance. By the slight trembling of her bottom lip, she suspected that it wasn't a convincing face. "It's alright," she lied in as steady a voice as she could draw from within herself. "Now, if you have a long journey to make, you'd better . . ."

As she trailed off, Kristoff took over the sentiment. "Ah, yes, we'd best be leaving," he muttered quickly, patting Sven's back with an unspoken instruction. The reindeer laboriously rose up to a standing position from the gangly sitting position he had assumed at his master's feet, and shook his head to clear his fur of snowflakes. "The trolls told me to wish you luck."

Elsa nodded swiftly. "Tell them that I'm endlessly grateful," she responded in a voice that seemed too formal, but that was the only barrier now between her and tears at her parents' death. As their conversation had proven, the wounds created by the loss were still raw and open, despite her naive belief that they were healing. "Thank you for coming – and Kristoff?"

The boy turned from the doorway, just when he was about to slip off into the corridor and disappear back into the crowds of Arendelle. "Yes, Your . . . Your Majesty?" he called back.

"Tell the butler before you leave that you'd like to visit the kitchens – if you say that I sent you, they won't refuse. Take whatever you like for the journey." She sent him a weak smile – the boy was quite muscular but his frame was still distinctly lanky, and she dreaded the thought of him struggling off into the mountains unfed.

Kristoff's face broke into an uncontrollable grin. "Thanks!" he laughed as he motioned Sven out of the library. She had expected some kind of farewell, but that was it – with the sound of clopping of hooves in the hallway, she realised that she was alone again, and her eyes dropped down to consider the scribbled message.

She held it up gingerly to her face and inspected it, trying to ignore the various stray blotches of ink and spelling errors:

_Your Majestie,_

_We hope that youre journey home was successfull and that you are happy. We are also very saddenned to hear of your parents passing – it is truly a loss to the hole kingdom, as they were kind and noble people. We are only a rowboat away should you need us again._

_However it has come to the attenshun of a few select members of our communitie that there was an aditional result of your sacrifise that we neglekted to tell you about. It is indeed an unlikely consequens of the event at hand but we felt it best to inform you stil._

_The storm on that night, as you kno, affekted your choice of options in the present. It has become clear that it could also affekt you in the futchure. Your powers might have retayned some of the energie released in the storm – you may have notised that they are now stronger than they were bevore. This is not a coinsidens. It may only get werse._

_Our advise to you is that you stay within your limitts – an emoshional disrupshun may push your powers over the edge, and there could be consequenses that we have not seen for meny years. Stay safe and be wary of your uneeke gift; if you do not lern how to kontrol it, it could betrae you in the end._

_With considerashun,_

_Trolls._

* * *

**Author's Note:** Yikes! This chapter is up reaaally late, which I'm sorry about. I didn't intend for it to get this bad, but as I've said before, it's school and other obligations that are unfortunately keeping me away. Only a few chapters left though, so hang on for the ending! Once again, thanks for your lovely support in the way of favourites, follows and reviews - last time I checked, this story had 80 followers and 50 favourites! That's _insane_! Thank you so much for sticking around, and I hope you liked this chapter!


	27. I Always Do

Ever since Elsa had told the servants that she was not to be disturbed until further notice, knocks on her door had become infrequent. She had told the butler this as she passed him on the corridor on her way back from the library; though he had looked confused, he accepted it without question, and his was the last face she had seen before she shut herself away.

The third dawn of this solitude stretched across the horizon like a vivid stain, and Elsa peeled back the thick curtains just enough to see a boat drift across the fjord. A memory of Dalli's face was never far from her mind when she looked out at the morning water, but she realised that those memories were dimmer now; his eyes were not so bright in retrospect, his face not so distinct. It had been some time since she had seen them in reality, she reasoned – but still, the feeling of slowly forgetting him was not a pleasant one to endure.

She drew back the curtains and tied them away from the window, letting the light flood in and illuminate her squalor. Though the servants still left meals outside her door every day, they acknowledged her rule of no entry and could no longer clean her room, leaving it in a state of sorry disarray. Her floor was hidden in places by stacks of books, all leather-bound and well-thumbed by her hands. They were the various editions of King Alfred's diary, which she seemed to consume at an unprecedented rate – sat on her desk, open and patiently awaiting her touch, was his final diary.

A single glove was strewn over one pile, with its fingertips permanently bleached white due to the growing strength of her powers. Its pair had to be lingering somewhere amongst the mess but her heart did not ache to seek it out as much as it ached to read Alfred's final entries; family history lessons that stretched back through her years of education had taught her that his death was swiftly approaching in the dates of his diary.

She turned to her desk and moved towards it, eager to read those final pages and block out everything else that was haunting her thoughts. That might have been easy – she had disappeared into a book plenty of times before, in times of want or loneliness – if the sound of a timid knock at her door had not drawn her back into reality.

"Elsa?"

She knew the voice, and hearing it sent her stomach into a dread-filled downward spiral. It was a voice that she had told herself she had to forget, at least for a few years – just the sound of it sent a sudden shard of violent ice bursting up from her bedroom floor. It was Anna.

For a fleeting moment, Elsa considered answering her sister's call. She sounded fragile, and deep inside her belly, she felt a sudden urge to comfort her – _but no_. She had made a promise to herself that she would keep Anna safe! Even if keeping her safe meant . . . even if it meant ignoring her.

"Please, I know you're in there."

Her voice seemed to shake, and another wave of instinctual concern flooded Elsa's mind. A slower, smaller shard of blue ice began to creep up next to the first. Elsa didn't bother to raise her hands in an attempt to stop it, as such efforts had been futile in the past. She could no longer bring herself to test the extent of her powers now that Dalli was gone – and suddenly, the thought of him flashed into her consciousness and all those faded memories burned painfully bright for a second or two. They would fade again, of course, but thinking of him and Anna in the same second seemed to send another shard of ice straight through her heart.

"People are asking where you've been."

Elsa forced her shaking legs to take one step forwards – one step towards the door couldn't hurt Anna, could it? If she could just get closer to that voice, then perhaps her sister could sense her presence and be comforted somehow. It was an impossible plan and it could lead to no good, but desperation was rising in the pit of her stomach and all she could think about was Anna. Suddenly, against the sound of her sister's rising wail, all those thoughts about duty and protection seemed incredibly small.

"They say have courage, and I'm trying to."

_Anna, please don't give up._ She took another tentative step towards the entrance and watched helplessly as a third miniature iceberg rose up to her left.

"I'm right out here for you."

_I know. _Another few careful steps. Another iceberg.

"Please let me in."

_Anna, if I could . . ._ Giving her sister mental responses would never be effective, but there was nothing else that Elsa could do. The heavy oak of her bedroom door could not be shifted by the weight of want alone; years of advice and warning and control would have to shift too, and she could not do it. She simply _could not do it_.

"We only have each other."

They shared blood. They shared a name. They shared a home. But it was difficult for Elsa to imagine, in the freezing emptiness of her bedroom, that they stood together; the only face she could see was the reflection of her own in the edge of a gleaming iceberg. Anna was pledging their solidarity, but Elsa had never felt more alone.

"It's just you and me."

Elsa took the final juddering steps towards her door and found herself coming closer to the ground, lowering herself amongst the towers of books and clothing. The door was a few inches away – if she could reach out and grab it, it would be that simple. It would be just Anna and Elsa. And she could grab it now, if only . . .

"What are we going to do?"

_I don't know._ And that was the thought that scared her the most. _I don't know._

There were a few seconds of deathly silence. There were a few inches of space between them. Both felt so much longer in the tension of this tragic circumstance.

"Do you want to build a snowman?"

Elsa rested her head carefully against the oak door, so as not to make a sound and give Anna any false hope. She shut her eyes to the dozen or so shards of ice that had risen up around her, and tried to hold in her tears. After a few minutes, she heard Anna turn away and give up.

_I always do._

* * *

The sky was orange again with approaching dusk when Elsa could finally bring herself to move again. The morning had faded into the afternoon, and the afternoon was now sinking into evening with the same thoughts swirling ceaselessly around her tired mind: while the clock counted each wasted second, she collected a list of personal losses.

She had lost Dalli to a faraway land, where she imagined him forgetting her with each distant breath. She had lost Anna to a potion and a duty. She had lost her parents to the sea – and she was about to lose Alfed to the pages of a tattered old diary.

When she had mustered the internal courage to rise away from the door, she went over to her desk, and ran her finger tentatively against the edge of his final journal. The pages were silky and delicate as if they might rip with a single tug; its cover, leather and gilded with a beautiful silver crest, was engrained with tiny flecks of gathered dust. A small trickle of ice from her finger began to seep through the veins of the leather like long-lost blood, and she watched it with inquisitive, unfeeling eyes.

At last, she forced herself to open the book to where she had marked it, and cast her eyes across the shaky handwriting of the last few pages. Though King Alfred had been lost forty years ago, she almost couldn't bring herself to sit down and read of his death; she had relied on him in times when others were not reliable. She had turned to his wisdom and advice when nobody else could show her sense. It was almost as if he was a real, tangible presence in the room with her when she sat alone and read what he had written – and that suddenly made her _not_ alone. That was certainly a feeling she would miss.

But it was one she would have to miss. She had come to believe that these past few weeks were a chapter of her life written in tears and blood; as time inched forwards into a future she could not ignore, it was time to bring the chapter to a close and begin anew. Her story could not continue if it dragged remnants of her past into each new adventure, and so Elsa resolved to herself that she had to finish Alfred's diary now. She could not allow herself to linger on it – and at last, for the first time in a very long time, she began to feel a little bit better.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Hi again! I have to repeat myself: sorry for the late update. I suppose you've already heard all of my weak excuses, so I needn't repeat those. ;) Thanks for your continued support for this story. As a little note to _thewookie1_: Thanks for your comment - yes, I wasn't sure where to place the dates of Frozen, but as I kind of assumed that it was set in an alternative world anyway (given that Elsa has magic powers and things like that), I went with 2013. I might go back and amend them to suit an earlier, more appropriate 'real world' date once the story is finished, if I can find out how to do such a thing. :P Until then, we may just have to stick with these dates. Thank you for pointing it out anyway though! :)


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